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WHITE  NIGHTS 

AND  OTHER 

RUSSIAN 

IMPRESSIONS 


ARTHUR  RUHL 


BOOKS  BY  ARTHUR  RUHL 

Pdblished  bt  CHAKLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 


WHITE  NIGHTS:  and  OTHER  RUSSIAN 
IMPRESSIONS.      Illustrated.       12mo 

tiH  $2.00 

ANTWERP  TO  GALLIPOLI.  A  Year  of 
War  on  Many  Fronts — and  Behind  Them. 
Illustrated.     12mo net  $1.50 

SECOND  NIGHTS:  People  and  Ideas  of  the 

Theatre  To-Day.     12mo     .     .     .     .    nel  $1.60 

THE  OTHER  AMERICANS.      Illustrated. 

limo ntt  $2.00 


WHITE   NIGHTS 


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WHITE  NIGHTS 


AND    OTHER    RUSSIAN    IMPRESSIONS 


BY 

ARTHUR   RUHL 


WITH    ILLUSTRATIONS    FROM    PHOTOGRAPHS 


NEW  YORK 

CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 

1917 


Copyright,  1917,  bt 
CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 


PubUshed  May,  1917 


URL 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTEB  PAGB 

I.    The  Road  to  Russia 1 

11.    White  Nights 33 

III,  At  the  Front 60 

IV.  The  Moscow  Art  Theatre 99 

V.    A  Look  at  the  Duma 119 

VI.    Russia's  War  Prisoners 135 

VII.    A  Russian  Cotton  King 160 

VIII.    Down  the  Volga  to  Astrakhan 174 

IX.    Volga  Refugees 206 

X.    Rumania  Learns  What  War  Is 223 


ILLUSTRATIONS 


In  the  heart  of  Russia — a  monastery  on  the  Volga  .     .  Frontispiece 

FACING  PAGE 

Coming  from  a  military  horse-show  at  the  Stockholm  Stadium      24 

Ellen  Key  at  the  door  of  her  house  at  Alvastra 24 

Looking  down  one  of  Petrograd's  canals  toward  the  dome  of 

St.  Isaac's 34 

Real  Russia — Sunday  picnic  parties  on  a  river  near  Moscow  .      34 

Two  of  the  players  of  the  Imperial  Theatre,  Petrograd — 

Kovalenskaya  and  the  veteran  comedian,  Davidov     .     .      54 

Russian  reserves  just  behind  the  front  dancing  for  a  prize. 

The  competitors  stand  in  line  at  the  left 66 

In  the  Pale — ^Jews  of  Minsk  waiting  their  turn  to  buy  sugar  .       66 

Decorated — "The  General  appeared  like  a  proud  and  slightly 

amused  parent  with  his  hurly-burly  children  " .     .     .     .      82 

Young  Russian  officers  saying  good-by  as  they  were  about  to 

leave  for  the  French  front 82 

"The  Three  Sisters" — Germanova,  at  the  left,  who  played 
the  middle  sister  in  Chekhov's  play;  Zdanova,  the  younger 
sister,  and  Knipp>er  (Mme.  Chekhov)  at  the  right,  who 
played  Masha.  Mme.  Chekhov  is  seen  here  as  she  ap- 
peared in  "Autumn  Violins" 100 

Priest  Deputies  to  the  Duma  strolling  beside  the  lake  adjoin- 
ing Taurida  Palace 124 

A  group  of  "Pristavs,"  who  acted  as  ushers,  vote  collectors, 

etc.,  in  the  National  Duma 124 

vu 


ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING   PAOE 

Professor  Paul  Miliukov,  leader  of  the  constitutional  Demo- 
cratic party  and,  after  the  coup  d'etat  of  1917,  Minister  of 
Foreign  Affairs 128 

Rodzianko  (at  the  right),  President  of  the  National  Duma, 
and  the  Duma  Vice-President  on  one  of  the  porticos  of 
Taurida  Palace 128 

The  owner's  house — only  a  stone's  throw  from  the  mill     .     .  162 

A  family  group  at  the  foot  of  the  garden  behind  the  house     .  162 

Two  of  the  dormitories  used  by  workmen  and  their  families     .  170 

View  from  the  owner's  house — one  of  the  mills  in  the  distance  170 

Nizhni-Novgorod — the  old  rampart  in  the  foreground,  the 
quarter  where  the  great  fair  is  held  across  the  river. 
The  right  branch  is  the  Volga,  the  left  the  Oka     .     .     .     186 

Fresh  cannon-fodder — peasant  recruits  waiting  for  the  boat 

at  one  of  the  stations  on  the  lower  Volga 202 

Refugees  with  their  packs  leaving  the  steamer  in  which  they 

had  been  brought  across  the  Caspian 216 

After  landing  across  the  river  from  Saratov — waiting  for  the 

train 216 

Bargaining  for  grapes  in  a  Bucharest  street  with  a  little  Ru- 
manian peasant 226 

A  typical  residence  street  in  Bucharest,  leading  off  the  Galea 

Vittorei 226 


<( 


-Little  Demoiselles,  looking,  but  for  the  Red  Cross  on 
their  sleeves,  like  sketches  from 'La  Vie  Parisienne*  .  .  ."    238 

Take  lonescu,  editor  of  Im,  Roumanic,  and  one  of  those  most 

active  in  urging  Rumania  to  enter  the  war 238 


vm 


WHITE   NIGHTS 


THE  ROAD  TO  RUSSIA 

Our  Danish  liner  steamed  out  into  the  Atlantic 
for  a  day  or  two,  then  turned  off  the  regular  path 
and  laid  a  course  which  would  carry  her  north  of 
England.  For  more  than  a  week  she  held  north- 
eastward, into  colder  waters  and  longer  days,  until, 
one  bright  afternoon,  a  British  cruiser  came  up 
over  the  eastern  horizon  and  ordered  her  to  stop. 
Obediently  the  engines  ceased  throbbing,  and 
the  Httle  ship — little,  at  any  rate,  before  all  the 
big  liners  were  sunk  or  doing  something  else — fell 
off  into  the  trough  of  the  sea.  We  were  a  neutral 
passenger-ship  proceeding  under  a  neutral  flag  from 
one  neutral  port  to  another.  We  were  in  nobody's 
territorial  waters,  trying  to  slip  into  no  blockaded 
harbor — in  short,  on  the  high  sea,  the  bright,  the 
blue,  the  ever-free,  or  whatever  it  was  the  poet 
said,  not  thinking  of  wars  and  the  right  of  search. 
As  a  matter  of  fact,  we  were  not  free  at  all.  We 
were  prisoners,  a  sort  of  armed  prize-crew  were 
about  to  board  us  and  take  us  into  an  English  port, 
to  be  searched,  to  give  up  our  cargo,  perhaps,  our 

1 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

mails,  or  our  persons,  as  it  pleased  our  captors  to 
direct. 

The  passengers,  in  their  familiar  r61e  of  helpless 
bystanders,  flocked  to  the  rail  and  watched  the 
little  dingy,  with  its  occupants  bundled  in  life- 
preservers,  climb  painfully  over  the  intervening 
hills  of  green  water  and  make  the  swaying  rope 
ladder.  Two  young  officers  came  over  the  rail, 
then  a  sailor  with  a  brace  of  pistols  in  his  belt,  then 
another  with  a  rifle,  and  last,  and  very  quaint  at 
the  end  of  its  long  rope,  a  tiny  Httle  pine  box  of 
cartridges.  But  quainter  still  and,  indeed,  a  quite 
touching  example  of  that  latent  gentlemanliness 
which  the  EngUsh  can  rarely  quite  suppress,  even 
when  doing  the  most  high-handed  things,  a  grocer's 
box  of  provisions — meat,  bread,  tinned  beef,  and 
some  absurd  potatoes,  which  insisted,  of  course, 
on  rolling  out  and  tumbling  back  into  the  boat. 
These  gentle  pirates  would  never  forget  their  private 
manners,  though  we  all  walked  the  plank. 

The  officers  conferred  with  the  captain,  one  re- 
turned, the  other  stayed;  one  sailor  went  below, 
the  other  took  his  place  in  the  wheel-house  to  see 
that  we  held  to  the  course,  and  we  steered  for  Kirk- 
wall. 

Late  next  afternoon  we  raised  the  bare  brown 
flanks  of  the  Orkney  Islands,  where  nobody  can 
make  a  living  but  a  Scotchman  and  his  sheep,  and 

2 


THE    ROAD    TO    RUSSIA 

just  before  sundown  dropped  anchor  in  Elirkwall 
Harbor.  The  chill  waters  were  full  of  ships — Dutch, 
Swedish,  Danish,  Norwegian — for  both  the  Amer- 
icas, and  the  East.  There  were  five  or  six  of  the 
tan-and-green  Holland- America  funnels  alone.  The 
Ryndam  was  there.  Some  said  the  big  Rotterdam 
and  New  Amsterdam  were  on  their  way.  Still  and 
meek  as  sheep  they  lay,  waiting  for  leave  to  go,  a 
vivid  little  object-lesson  in  the  meaning  of  such 
abstractions  as  "power"  and  "control  of  the  sea." 

Next  morning  there  came  a  sharper  one.  The 
winch  engines  were  rattling  as  I  awoke,  and  when 
I  came  on  deck  the  first  thing  I  saw  was  a  slingful 
of  blue-and-white  striped  United  States  mail-bags 
swinging  up  out  of  the  hold.  Shades  of  ancient 
woodcuts  of  the  pony  express,  of  city  mail-wagons 
riding  roughshod  over  everything  but  ambulances 
and  fire-carts,  of  small-boy  awe,  and  the  traditions 
of  country  gi-ocery  stores:  "Don't  try  to  stop  the 
U.  S.  maU!" 

Those  blue-and-white  striped  bags  belonged  to 
the  class  of  things  which  may  not  be  stopped  or 
meddled  with.  But  they  were  being  stopped  and 
meddled  with.  They  were  swinging  up  out  of  the 
hold  by  the  hundred — two  big  tugboats  full  of  them 
— and  they  were  going  ashore  and  down  to  London, 
to  be  opened,  examined  by  the  censor,  and  sent  on 
when,  how,  and  if  he  wished. 

3 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

Ordinarily,  none  but  the  captain  is  allowed  ashore 
during  such  halts,  but  an  exception  was  made  for 
the  American  ambassador,  on  his  way  to  Petrograd, 
and  the  Honorable  David  R.  Francis  permitted,  on 
the  second  day,  to  lunch  with  the  commandant  of 
the  port  and  get  a  glimpse  of  the  life  of  this  chilly 
and  mysterious  isle.  His  Excellency  was  asked  to 
bring  liis  golf-clubs  with  him — the  tawny,  rolling 
moor  looked  extremely  enticing  from  the  ship — 
and  he  also  took  his  man  Friday,  Phil,  a  body-servant 
of  the  old-fashioned  Southern  kind,  already  mourn- 
ing, after  but  a  week  of  foreign  ways,  for  the  hot 
biscuits  of  St.  Louis.  They  landed  in  one  of  those 
Scotch  mists  which  the  natives  of  the  British  Isles 
learn  to  bother  so  little  about. 

"It's  raining,  Phil,"  said  the  ambassador.  "I 
know  it,"  said  Phil,  "but  these  people  don't  know 
it." 

The  commandant,  a  pleasant-looking  little  old 
gentleman,  came  off  with  the  ambassador,  and 
also,  in  his  honor,  the  "prettiest  girl  in  Kirkwall." 
And  very  pretty  she  was,  too,  standing  in  the  wheel- 
house,  with  the  pink  cheeks  that  bloom  in  these 
island  mists  and  a  smoky  blue  muffler  round  her 
neck.  Permission  to  leave  came,  too,  wired  up  from 
London,  and  we  set  out  in  the  dusk  across  the 
North  Sea. 

The  little  ship  was  the  famous  Oscar  II,  on  which 

4 


THE    ROAD    TO    RUSSIA 

the  Ford  peace  pilgrims  had  crossed,  and  the  echoes 
of  that  remarkable  adventm-e  still  hung  about  it. 
To  the  captain  and  to  the  chief  engineer  the  gen- 
erous protagonist  of  the  expedition  had  handed, 
as  it  were,  an  automobile  as  he  left  the  ship — ^like 
a  cigar.  The  captain  said  that  he  had  done  a  thou- 
sand miles  in  his  already,  and  had  it  always  outside 
his  door  at  home.  In  the  summer  he  and  his  wife 
were  going  to  drive  all  over  Denmark.  "I'll  never 
walk  again!"  he  declared,  with  a  sly  seaman's  air 
of  escaping  the  last  of  land's  tyrannies. 

The  engineer  was  a  tallish,  jolly  old  gentleman, 
with  a  white  beard,  a  sort  of  elongated  and  more 
ethereal  Santa  Claus.  Frank  Stockton  might  have 
created  him  expressly  for  the  engineer  of  a  peace 
ship;  at  any  rate  he  seemed  to  belong  to  that  little 
boat,  with  its  snug  domestic  air,  as  indeed  to  these 
sound,  tidy  little  countries  of  the  north.  Among 
his  minor  accomplishments  was  that  of  cutting  a 
face  on  an  orange  and  squirting  the  juice  out  of  the 
mouth,  and  as  he  ambled  round  the  deck  on  his 
long  constitutionals  he  wore  a  flat  cap  fastened 
with  a  cord  under  his  chin,  giving  his  face  an  in- 
describable air  of  guilelessness. 

"How  good  life  is!"  he  annoimced  one  day, 
from  his  position  at  the  head  of  the  table.  Then, 
as  the  passengers  looked  up,  with  their  air  of  ex- 
pectmg  to  hear  another  salt-water  puzzle  elucidated. 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

he  continued:  "I  have  a  fine  wife,  I  have  a  fine 
daughter,  a  good  job,  good  pay,  and  I  like  the  sea. 
Why  not?'' 

The  North  Sea  was  crossed  without  incident. 
Next  afternoon  we  picked  up  the  granite  headlands 
of  Noi-way,  streaked  with  snow,  touched  at  Chris- 
tiansand,  and  next  morning  tied  up  in  Christiania. 

It  was  Sunday,  and  except  on  the  main  street 
leading  up  to  the  palace,  the  gray  old  town  was  still 
as  a  church.  It  was  spring  at  home,  and  spring 
here,  too,  but  the  rocky  hills  of  Noi-way  come  right 
down  to  the  sea — one  could  still  see  streaks  of 
snow  on  their  granite  shoulders — and  there  was  still 
good  skiing  within  an  hour  or  so  of  town.  Every- 
body was  up  in  the  hills,  we  were  told,  and  in  front 
of  the  dowTi-town  ticket-offices  were  bulletins  giv- 
ing the  temperature  of  a  score  or  so  of  winter-sport 
resorts,  and  telling  whether  it  was  sunny,  snowy, 
or  overcast.  Every  now  and  then  one  met  a  girl 
in  knickerbockers,  rucksack  on  her  back,  skis 
under  her  arm,  striding  toward  the  station  for  a 
day  in  the  hills. 

These  young  women  made  one  think  of  the  girl 
who  came  breezing  into  the  old  architect's  life  in 
Ibsen's  "Master  Builder" — Christiania  gave  one, 
indeed,  the  oddest  sense  of  going  behmd  the  scenes, 
of  looking  over  the  shoulder,  so  to  speak,  of  that 
grim  old  man  of  genius.    Among  these  very  masts 

6 


THE    ROAD    TO    RUSSIA 

and  warehouses  lived  the  ship-owner  in  "An  Enemy 
of  the  People" — this  harbor  might  serve  as  a  back 
drop.  The  granite  headlands  with  their  aspiring 
firs  and  streaks  of  snow,  the  very  air  with  its  under- 
current of  arctic  chill,  seemed  to  invoke  the  Ibsen 
mood.  Plainly,  if  one  grew  up  in  it,  and  in  this 
old  towTi,  reaching  out  through  its  ships  to  the 
great  world,  yet  shut  in  with  the  prejudices  of 
a  little-world  capital,  one  would  think  and  write 
in  just  that  way. 

Having  thus  solved  the  Ibsen  mysteiy,  even  to 
seeing  the  name  of  some  of  his  people  on  ordinary 
shop-signs,  and  the  cafe  where  he  used  to  sit  morn- 
ings, I  asked  our  hostess  that  afternoon  whether 
he  had  lived  right  here  in  Christiania. 

"Ibsen?"  she  said.  "Oh,  yes,  of  course — Ibsen. 
I  can  show  you  his  apartment  from  here." 

Ibsen — an  apartment !  "Peer  Gynt"  might  have 
been  written  m  a  castle,  or  even  in  a  log  house  on 
the  brink  of  some  fiord — but  in  a  flat !  However, 
such  was  the  fact,  and  a  moment  later  we  were 
looking  up  at  the  second  floor  of  a  respectable  apart- 
ment-house that  might  have  been  on  the  upper 
West  Side  or  anywhere.  And  so  looking,  it  did 
not  appear  that  it  would  have  been  any  easier  to 
think  as  he  did  up  there  than  in  West  Eleventh 
Street,  Manhattan.  Genius  comes  out  of  thin  air 
in  Christiania,  as  anywhere  else,  and,  greatly  to 

7 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

one's  relief,  our  acidulous  old  hero  was  enthroned 
again. 

These  observations  were  accompanied,  of  course, 
by  talk  of  war,  and  here  in  Norway  such  talk  was 
generally  pro-AUy,  as  in  Sweden  it  was  generally 
pro-German.  The  Queen  is  English,  the  King  a 
Dane.  Norway,  not  having  Sweden's  fear  of  Rus- 
sia, has  not  looked  in  the  same  way  to  Germany  as 
her  natural  support,  and  with  her  long,  exposed 
west  coast  and  her  dependence  on  England  for  coal 
and  many  other  things  (Sweden  with  her  inside 
Baltic  trade  has,  of  course,  two  strings  to  her  bow), 
she  has  naturally  formed  a  habit  of  agreeing,  if 
possible,  with  England. 

The  gossip  that  afternoon  was  all  of  mails,  high 
freight-rates,  and  people  getting  rich.  The  Nor- 
wegian fishermen  could  sell  in  Germany  all  the 
fish  they  could  rake  and  scrape  together.  Herring 
that  used  to  cost  a  cent  apiece  cost  four  or  five 
now,  and  fishermen  who  thought  themselves  well 
off  if  they  paid  the  hire  of  their  boats  and  ended 
the  season  with  a  few  hundred  kroner  profit,  now 
come  back  from  one  trip  with  thousands.  One 
heard  of  freighters  paying  for  themselves  in  three 
months,  of  a  man  making  a  small  fortune  merely 
by  selling  an  option  on  ships  unbuilt  and  not  yet 
started.  Motor-cars  were  beginning  to  dash  through 
the  staid  old  Christiania  streets  as  never  before. 

8 


THE    ROAD    TO    RUSSIA 

You  could  go  over  to  Copenhagen  and  sell  anything 
at  any  sort  of  pricC;  provided  you  could  but  guar- 
antee to  deliver  it. 

In  Stockholm  one  felt  closer  to  the  war.  Talk 
and  feeling  were  more  intense.  It  is  a  long  day's 
railroad  ride  from  the  one  capital  to  the  other,  dur- 
ing which  one  obsei^ved  that  Swedish  trains  do  not 
whistle  or  rmg  a  bell  when  they  leave  a  station, 
but  steal  away  like  the  Arab.  Some  efficiency 
expert  added  up  the  energy  required  and  decided 
that  noise  cost  too  much.  One  of  our  party  was 
thus  left  on  the  platform  in  a  remote  village  staring 
at  the  sunset.  A  Russian  lady  in  our  coupe,  who 
had  lived  in  a  Riverside  Drive  apartment  for  a  few 
months  and,  in  the  wonderful  way  Russians  have, 
learned  our  language,  said  that  we  had  many  fine 
things,  but  felt  we  thought  too  much  about  them, 
as  contrasted  with  ideas,  and  that  some  day  we 
should  have  to  look  out  for  that.  She  found  our 
plays  rather  childish.  They  seemed  overaccented, 
or  cut  to  a  certain  comfortable  pattern  without 
regard  to  life  as  it  is — an  observation  to  reach  which 
it  is  not  absolutely  necessary  to  have  originated 
in  Russia. 

I  sat  in  another  compartment  with  three  mys- 
terious, smiling  Japs,  and  an  elderly  Norwegian 
lady,  suggestmg  Ellen  Terry,  rather  ornate  and 
redolent  of  cologne.    A  pretty  little  maid  brought 

9 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

her  to  tlie  train  and  courtcsied  as  she  said  good-by. 
Occasionally  she  vouchsafed  a  word  or  two  of  Eng- 
lish to  the  four  of  us,  varied  by  heavy  sighs,  as  if, 
mournful  though  it  was,  we  belonged  in  a  lower, 
more  prosaic  ether.  Once  we  passed  some  rapids. 
The  Norwegian  lady  said  that  soon  they  would 
use  such  waters  and  Norway  need  not  depend  on 
England  for  coal. 

''We  shall  have  our  own  white  coals,"  she  said, 
with  a  tremendous  sigh. 

It  was  midnight  when  we  reached  Stockholm, 
and  the  Grand  Hotel,  one  of  those  vast  caravansaries 
with  all  the  modern  improvements  for  taking  the 
local  flavor  out  of  life,  swallowed  us  up,  and  it  was 
not  until  I  came  out  into  the  sunlight  next  morn- 
ing and  saw  the  Palace  and  the  Riksdag  across  the 
water  and  the  North  Stream  rushing  by,  that  I 
reahzed  that  on  a  sunny  spring  day  Stockholm  is 
one  of  the  most  attractive  cities  in  the  world.  Fresh- 
water lakes  are  behind  the  town.  All  southern 
Sweden,  in  fact,  is  full  of  lakes.  In  front  are  salt- 
water channels  leading  out  to  sea,  and  round  the 
islands  and  twisting  strips  of  land  on  which  the 
city  is  built  the  fresh  water  comes  rushing  down, 
the  salt  breeze  from  the  Baltic  blows  in,  and  there 
was  scarce  a  place  that  morning  where,  down  one 
street  or  the  other,  or  squarely  in  front  of  you,  you 
could  not  see  running  water  and  sunshine  and  ships. 

10 


THE    ROAD    TO    RUSSIA 

It  is  as  if  there  were  rapids  boUing  down  Madison 
Avenue  and  ocean-going  craft  of  at  least  the  smaller 
sorts  could  tie  up  in  front  of  the  Metropolitan 
Building.  Real  countiy  with  rocks,  pines,  and  white 
birches  comes  pushing  in,  in  the  most  pleasantly 
unexpected  way,  and  only  a  few  minutes'  walk 
from  the  hotel  I  ran  into  a  couple  of  eight-oared 
crews. 

In  winter  the  light  only  lasts  from  about  ten  in 
the  morning  until  two,  and  Stockholm  may  be 
rather  dismal.  Possibly  that  is  why  the  Swedes 
make  so  much  of  the  summer  sunshine  while  it 
lasts.  Crowds  were  strolling  along  the  canals,  tak- 
ing theu'  coffee  outdoors,  in  the  Skansen  and  Has- 
selbacken.  And  the  sun  flashed  on  brass  weather- 
vanes  and  the  white  plumes  of  steam  from  dozens 
of  little  ferry-boats,  and  ocean  steamers  coming 
right  up  to  the  office  windows,  until  one  recalled 
the  blazing  mosques  and  water  and  crowded  ship- 
ping of  the  Golden  Horn. 

There  were  said  to  be  forty  thousand  foreigners 
in  Stockholm,  and  about  thirty-nine  thousand  of 
them  went  crisscrossmg  in  and  out  of  the  Grand 
Hotel  lobby — a  place  in  which,  if  one  could  under- 
stand every  language,  and  sit  a  sort  of  invisible 
imp  on  any  man's  shoulder,  one  might  have  heard 
more  strange  things  about  the  war  and  international 
poHtics  than  anywhere  else  in  Europe. 

11 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

Take  almost  any  quarter  of  an  hour.  Item  (1) : 
two  pink-cheeked  young  men  in  tweed  suits,  brown 
spatS;  and  soft  collars,  carrying  diplomatic  pouches 
— couriers  just  in  from  London  on  their  way  to 
Petrograd;  (2-7):  various  other  yomig  men  with  sim- 
ilar pouches  or  bureaucratic  portfolios,  dropping,  as 
they  huriy  by,  phrases  in  French,  German,  Russian, 
Italian,  and  languages  only  guessable;  (8):  four 
Russians  in  uniform,  arriving  hurriedly  from  no- 
where and  asking  in  French  for  rooms. 

One  da}^  the  Duma  Committee  went  through, 
westward  bound;  the  next,  boimd  east,  a  big, 
bearded  man,  Nicolai  Postisch,  Prime  Minister  of 
Serbia;  another  day  a  Greek  prince  or  a  French 
cabinet  minister.  Everybody  stared  more  or  less 
curiously  and  suspiciously  at  everybody  else,  lis- 
tened to  see  that  he  was  not  being  listened  to,  tore 
up  every  scrap  of  paper  into  microscopic  fragments 
before  throwing  them  away,  or  stuffed  them  into 
his  pocket  to  be  disposed  of  later.  I  rang  for  coffee, 
and  the  polite  Swede  who  poked  his  head  into  the 
doorway  had  been  a  German  the  winter  before  at 
a  hotel  in  Berlin,  and  the  porter  there  appeared 
now  in  a  long  coat,  a  conventional,  prosperous 
business  man — in  short,  all  the  figures  of  a  Philhps 
Oppenheim  novel  streaming  before  one's  eyes  like 
a  movie  play  day  after  day. 

Russia  is  Sweden's  traditional  bugaboo,  Ger- 
many her  natural  support,  and  on  this  basis  has 

12 


\ 

THE    ROAD    TO    RUSSIA 

grown  a  pretty  solid  neighborliness.  The  army  is 
modelled  on  German  methods,  the  miiversities 
largely  so,  and  German  ideas  have  been  widely 
distributed  through  the  habit  both  countries  have 
of  translating  each  other's  books.  A  stranger  com- 
ing into  Stockholm  feels  this  influence — in  the 
quite  Pmssian  policemen  with  their  long  coats  and 
gold-spiked  helmets;  in  the  blocks  of  newer  resi- 
dences that  might  have  been  lifted  from  Berlin 
suburbs,  and  in  various  vague  ways. 

The  war  had  strengthened,  for  the  time  being, 
at  least,  the  power  of  the  Conservatives — those, 
that  is  to  say,  who  were  friendly  to  Germany,  felt 
that  the  Russian  danger  was  real  (and  continually 
used  it  for  party  purposes),  did  not  wish  to  increase 
the  powers  of  the  Parliament,  and  wanted  a  larger 
army  and  navy. 

This  group,  which  controlled  all  but  one  of  the 
Stockholm  papers,  talked  bitterly  of  the  hypocrit- 
ical chatter  about  fighting  for  the  liberties  of  small 
nations,  of  maUs  and  cargoes,  as  they  put  it, 
"stolen."  The  air  was  full  of  protests  against  Eng- 
land's "bunkering  agreements,"  and  lively  stories 
of  adventures  with  it.  One  Swedish  captain  said 
he'd  be  dashed  if  he'd  sign,  coal  or  no  coal.  So  he 
put  to  sea,  burned  out  what  he  had  half-way  across 
the  North  Sea,  tore  out  his  woodwork,  and  came 
into  port  on  that. 

It  was  interesting,  and  thoroughly  in  keeping 

13 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

with  a  time  when  so  many  accepted  phrases  are 
changing  their  meaning,  that  a  Swede  might  be 
poHtically  Conservative  and  at  the  same  time,  in 
his  social  views,  what  would  generally  be  called 
broad  or  even  radical  at  home.  One  young  man 
who  had  spent  a  good  deal  of  time  in  social-settle- 
ment work  in  America,  and  who  took  me  through 
one  of  the  model  Stockholm  public  schools  where 
everything  helpful  is  provided  for  children,  was 
later  described,  somewhat  to  my  suiprise,  as  a 
Conservative.  It  was  explained  that  the  Conser- 
vatives often  favored  socialistic  legislation,  but 
looked  at  it  from  the  German  point  of  view,  in 
which  benefits  for  the  people  were  combined  with 
the  individual's  subordination  to  the  state. 

The  Conservatives  would  talk  about  the  perfidy 
of  England  as  long  as  one  would  listen — some  with 
fury,  some  quite  soberly,  and  with  disappointment, 
evidently  genuine,  at  what  they  described  as  the 
failure  of  powerful  America  to  co-operate  with  the 
smaller  neutral  nations  in  a  stand  for  neutral  rights 
at  sea,  before  it  was  too  late. 

The  Liberals,  on  the  other  hand,  minimized  the 
Russian  danger,  the  need  of  extreme  measures  of 
military  preparation,  and  were,  generally  speaking, 
friendly  to  England.  They  believed  that  England 
had  gone  too  far  in  taking  cargoes  from  neutral 
ships,  but  that  much  of  the  hardship  of  neutral 

14 


THE    ROAD    TO    RUSSIA 

shippers  was  the  inevitable  result  of  war.  They 
felt  that  Sweden's  democratic  ideas  had  come  from 
England,  and  feared  the  reactionary  uses  to  which 
the  Russian  danger  was  being  and  might  be  put. 
Some  said  that  it  would  be  to  Sweden's  advantage 
if  Russia  got  her  way  at  the  Dardanelles — that  she 
might  cease  to  be  a  danger  in  the  north. 

The  bitterness  between  these  two  groups  was 
intense,  and  when  Russia  began  to  fortify  the  Aland 
Islands,  only  a  stone's  throw  out  into  the  Baltic 
from  Stockholm,  the  chances  that  Sweden  might 
be  forced  into  the  war  seemed  anything  but  remote. 

The  war  touched  Sweden  directly  when,  once  a 
week,  the  transports  of  German  and  Russian  ex- 
changed prisoners  went  through — broken  men,  of 
no  more  use  as  soldiers,  scrapped,  and  sent  home. 
I  saw  them  at  Hallsberg,  a  little  town  about  four 
hours  from  Stockholm,  where  the  Swedish  Red 
Cross  tram  stopped  for  them  to  be  rested  and  fed. 

The  volunteers  in  charge  of  receiving  the  prisoners 
went  down  from  Stockholm  on  the  morning  train 
— several  pretty  Swedish  ladies,  who,  for  the  bene- 
fit of  the  one  Englishwoman  with  them,  dropped 
everj^  now  and  then  into  English,  and  a  keen,  bullet- 
headed  man  with  glasses  and  a  stick  over  his  arm, 
who  appeared  to  represent  German  societies  in 
Sweden.  It  was  a  beautiful  morning,  and  as  the 
train  hurried  on  the  ladies  talked  amiably  of  what 

15 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

they  had  brought  with  them,  wondermg  if  there 
were  enough  cigarettes.  "But  I  don't  suppose," 
concluded  one,  "that  the  poor  consumptives  ought 
to  smoke  much,  ought  they?"  Eighty  out  of  the 
last  lot  of  two  hundred  were  dying  of  tuberculosis, 
and  four  did  die  on  the  train. 

We  whirled  down  through  the  lake  country — 
lake  after  lake  fringed  with  pine  and  white  birches, 
the  whole  ground  purple  and  white,  sometimes, 
with  violets  and  anemones.  At  Hallsberg  tables 
were  set  with  soup-plates  and  big  disks  of  hard 
Swedish  bread;  boxes  of  chocolate  and  tobacco 
opened;  and  on  a  counter  on  the  platform  the 
bullet-headed  gentleman  laid  neat  rows  of  boxes 
and  paper  bags.  The  boxes  were  in  the  red,  white, 
and  black  German  colors,  and  on  the  paper  bags, 
each  of  which  contained  tobacco,  post-cards,  choco- 
late, and  so  on,  was  stamped  "  Von  Landsleuten  in 
Schweden"  ("From  fellow  countiymen  m  Sweden"). 

There  was  a  whistle,  the  puik-cheeked  Swedish 
cadets  cleared  the  platform,  and  the  long  train 
rolled  slowly  in.  The  bunks  were  down  and  from 
several  of  them  yellow-white  faces  were  raised 
enough  to  look  out.  Most  of  the  men,  however, 
were  able  to  walk,  and  on  crutches,  helping  one 
another,  they  worked  out  to  the  platform.  Only 
a  few  were  Germans,  the  rest  Austro-Hungarians, 
bundled  up  now  in  new  and  stiff  gray-blue  over- 

16 


THE    ROAD    TO    RUSSIA 

coats,  sent  to  meet  them  at  the  border.  A  few  had 
curly  black  wool  caps  given  them  in  Russia,  and  one 
young  fellow  still  wore  the  blue-and-gold-braided 
jacket  of  a  Hungarian  hussar. 

There  could  be  no  doubt,  as  they  stood  there  in 
the  sunlight,  that  they  were  no  longer  to  be  feared 
as  soldiers.  They  were  past  all  that,  beyond  cheers, 
band-music,  wa\ing  flags,  and  all  the  old  excite- 
ments of  war.  One  could  imagine  them  looking 
back  to  the  days  of  1914,  when  they  flocked  to  the 
colors  and  went  marching  eastward  on  the  start 
of  the  tragic  circle  which  now  they  were  completing, 
as  old  men  look  back  to  half-real,  sunshiny  memories 
of  things  they  did  as  boys.  If  it  amused  these  kind 
ladies  to  play  with  their  kmdness  and  add  a  piquant 
dash  of  tragedy  to  the  soft  spring  morning,  all  very 
well,  but  we  must  not  expect  them  to  get  excited 
about  it. 

Most  of  them  had  lost  a  leg  or  a  foot;  most  who 
had  legs  dragged  along  with  diflSculty,  clothes  and 
boots  coveruig  something  unhealed  or  unhealable. 
One  such  man  scuffed  along  crabwise  in  a  big  felt 
boot.  Several  wore  black  glasses  and  seemed  more 
or  less  blind,  one  man's  head  was  still  a  bundle  of 
bandages,  and  one  had  a  round  black  hole  where 
his  face  should  have  been.  He  had  been  shot  through 
the  jaw  and  the  wound  had  healed,  leaving  him 
with  no  nose  or  upper  teeth.    And  on  nearly  all 

17 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

lay  a  waxy  pallor  which  affected  one  strangely, 
like  the  beating  of  black,  invisible  wings. 

The  cadets  began  to  sing  a  song  of  welcome. 
The  prisoners,  drawn  up  in  front  of  them,  listened 
apathetically.  How  many  times  had  they  been 
lined  up  thus — to  be  drilled,  inspected,  fed,  shot 
at,  to  get  the  numbers  that  each  now  wore — now  to 
be  sung  at!  Very  well,  sing  away;  nevertheless, 
they  saluted  and  muttered  a  respectful  "Hoch!" 
at  the  end. 

The  ladies  started  with  theii'  flowers,  and  pres- 
ently each  one  of  the  prisoners  was  holding  a  fresh 
daffodil.  They  brought  baskets  and  began  to  pass 
things  around,  and  at  the  word  "cigarettes"  the 
men  even  began  to  show  signs  of  interest.  Some 
grinned,  and  each  as  he  took  his  package  straight- 
ened and  brought  his  stubby  fingers  to  his  cap. 
When  one  of  the  ladies  set  her  basket  down  and 
went  back  for  another  the  long  coats  gathered  around 
it  and  began  to  poke  into  it,  somewhat  as  fish,  be- 
coming reassured,  gather  romid  some  new  and^ 
suspicious  sort  of  bait. 

There  were  all  sorts  of  things  in  the  basket.  One 
took  a  pipe  and  turned  it  over  and  over  as  if  he  had 
forgotten  what  a  pipe  looked  like.  Most  of  them 
took  one  of  the  colored  handkerchiefs,  unfolded  it, 
looked  at  it  critically,  folded  it  up  again,  and  care- 
fully stowed  it  away  in  a  coat-pocket.    The  men 

18 


THE    ROAD    TO    RUSSIA 

began  almost  to  push  around  the  basket,  until  a 
petty  officer  growled  "Langsam!  Langsam!" 
("Slowly!") — and  they  drew  back.  But  the  lady 
came  back  with  more — there  was  enough  for  every- 
body— they  took  what  they  wanted  and,  still  in 
the  same  half-dazed  fashion,  moved  off  toward 
the  station  dining-room  very  slowly,  like  a  bio- 
graph  picture  keyed  down. 

After  dinner  the  prisoners  gathered  on  benches 
under  the  trees,  some  one  brought  out  an  accordion, 
and  they  sang.  They  sang  "Deutschland  uber 
Alles" — rather  wearily  compared  with  the  gay 
choruses,  full  of  lively  tenor,  of  the  young  Swedes, 
and  after  each  song  one  side  applauded  the  other 
and  the  ladies  smiled  and  clapped  their  hands. 
A  signal  came  finally,  and  they  climbed  back  on 
the  train,  still  carrying  their  wilted  daffodils. 

A  young  Swede  hanging  over  the  high  fence  of 
the  railroad-yard  shouted  out,  proud  of  his  German 
and  the  foreign  places  he  had  seen,  "Leb'  wohl!" 
and  that  he  had  been  in  Germany,  and  in  Austria, 
too,  in  the  Tyrol.  Three  young  cadets  passed  me, 
puzzling  out  the  penciled  address  on  a  post-card 
one  of  the  prisoners  had  given  them  to  mail.  It 
was  somewhere  in  Budapest. 

Budapest  in  springtime! — and  the  Danube  flow- 
ing by,  and  bands  playing  csdrdds,  and  people 
dancing  in  Varosliget,  and  the  gay  crowd  flowing 

19 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

along  the  Corso,  under  the  lights  and  trees!  So 
that  was  what  he  was  coming  back  to.  To  get 
well  again  and  be  a  hero — or  a  bore,  perhaps — to  his 
family  and  friends,  or,  with  all  his  troubles  over, 
simply  to  gutter  down  in  the  next  few  weeks  like 
a  bumed-out  candle?  What  had  these  men  accom- 
plished and  what  did  it  all  mean — this  thing  that 
was  still  going  on  as  if  they  had  done  nothing? 
Something  of  that  question  seemed  to  show  in  the 
officers'  eyes  as,  clicking  their  heels  and  stiffening, 
they  saluted  the  women  who  had  seized  them. 
The  men,  too,  brought  their  hands  to  their  caps, 
and  the  train,  with  all  its  riddles  unanswered,  rolled 
away  in  the  soft  May  sunshine. 

Morning  coffee  was  over,  and  the  daily  play 
was  beginning  agam  in  the  lobby  of  the  Grand 
Hotel,  when  a  porter  appeared  with  a  folded  blue 
paper.  It  was  a  telegram  from  a  little  village  on 
the  other  side  of  Sweden,  from  a  villa  by  a  lake. 
"  Hernrna  Tisdag  "  it  read  ("  Home  Tuesday") .  There 
was  just  time  to  catch  the  train. 

We  hurried  across  Stockholm's  canals  and  into 
the  country:  lake  after  lake  with  pines  and  white 
birches,  sawmills  and  timber  rafts  that  would  pres- 
ently be  turned  into  paper  and  read  in  American 
cities,  red  bams  and  red  farmhouses  and  trim  fields 
— and  finally  a  wide  stretch  of  water  at  the  end  of 

20 


THE    ROAD    TO    RUSSIA 

the  line.  It  was,  I  supposed,  an  arm  of  the  sea, 
but  really  Vettern,  one  of  the  big  lakes  of  southern 
Sweden,  seventy-five  miles  long,  ten  or  twelve  wide, 
and  somewhere  near  was  Alvastra  and  the  home  of 
Ellen  Key. 

No  one  could  speak  EngHsh  at  the  little  station, 
but  somebody  pointed  out  the  general  direction, 
and  I  started  down  the  road.  Straight  ahead  was 
a  dark  pine  ridge,  a  sort  of  low  moimtain  running 
out  into  the  lake,  and  at  the  base  of  it,  across  the 
bay,  there  glimmered  a  Httle  white  summer-house 
or  pergola  close  to  the  water.  I  remembered  hav- 
ing seen  a  picture  of  that  somewhere  and  decided 
that  the  house  just  above  it  in  the  trees  must  be 
the  one. 

It  was  tea  time  now,  and  back  in  Stockholm 
the  palm-room  was  crowded  and  clattering,  the 
orchestra-leader  tearing  the  last  shreds  out  of 
"Tosca,"  and  people  glaring  and  listening  at  their 
neighbors  and  wondering  who  their  neighbors  were. 
Very  quaint  they  looked,  at  that  distance  and  from 
the  quiet  of  the  country,  all  the  queer  fish  criss- 
crossing yet  never  meeting,  all  the  smooth  gentle- 
men with  pointed  black  beards  and  pointed  black 
coats,  who  think  that  nations  can  still  be  packed 
up  and  carried  about  in  a  diplomat's  little  leather 
bag — as,  tragically  enough,  they  sometimes  are. 
Decidedly  like  puppets;  and  with  rather  an  enter- 

21 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

taining  sense  of  escape  I  tramped  on  to  the  little 
hotel  perched  half-way  up  the  hill. 

It  was  not  really  in  running  order  for  the  summer, 
the  landlady  was  away,  and  I  was  again  struggling 
with  the  sign  language,  when  somebody  came  to 
the  rescue — a  tall,  dark,  grave,  distinguished-look- 
ing lady  who  spoke  a  little  EngHsh  and  brought  a 
vague  odor  of  attar  of  roses.  She  was  from  Fin- 
land, also  come  to  see  Ellen  Key,  with  whom  she 
was  dining  that  evening,  and  she  said  she  would 
report  my  arrival  and  find  out  when  it  would  be 
convenient  for  me  to  call. 

They  are  novel  and  interesting,  these  Finlanders, 
to  the  simple-minded  American  who  thinks  of  Fin- 
land as  consisting  of  reindeer  and  ice.  Every  grown- 
up person  votes  in  Finland,  and  the  women  sit  in 
the  Legislature.  And  this  far-away  place  consists, 
apparently,  not  of  reindeer  and  ice,  but  of  lively 
and  intelligent  people  who  speak  every  language 
you  ever  heard  of.  The  companion  of  this  partic- 
ular lady  did,  indeed,  speak  all  the  languages  of  Eu- 
rope; she  was  a  tremendous  politician  and  suf- 
fragist, spoke  familiarly  of  Mrs.  Chapman  Catt 
and  other  Americans,  and  she  was,  as  her  card  re- 
lated: Medlem  av  Finlands  Landtag.  II  viceord- 
foranden  i  internal.  Kvinnorostrattsalliansen.  Ord- 
forande  i  Svenska  Kvinnoforbundet  i  Finland — which 
means  a  member  of  the  Finnish  Diet,  among  other 
things. 

22 


THE    ROAD    TO    RUSSIA 

They  said  when  they  came  back  that  night  and 
we  had  tea  together  that  Miss  Key  sent  her  best 
greetings  and  would  be  dehghted  to  see  me  at  ten 
next  morning.  So  at  ten  I  walked  through  the 
woodS;  dowTi  a  steep  path,  to  a  house  set  in  the 
hillside  near  the  water,  which  made  one  think  of 
summer  places  at  Oyster  Bay  or  Coldspring  Harbor, 
and  rang  the  bell  at  a  big  door  in  the  upper  panel 
of  which  were  two  old-fashioned  little  heart-shaped 
windows. 

Instantly  there  was  a  tremendous  barking  and 
thumping  of  paws — Miss  Key's  St.  Bernard  is 
as  big  as  a  house — a  maid  accustomed,  evidently, 
to  such  pilgrims  opened  the  door,  and  a  moment 
later  I  was  shaking  hands  with  a  sturdy  little  woman 
— a  very-much-alive  woman,  with  a  quick,  humor- 
ous mouth,  a  longish,  speculative  nose,  and  gray- 
blue,  wise,  kind  eyes. 

The  Finlanders  had  remarked  that  the  only  two 
women  know^i  all  over  the  world  to-day  happened 
to  be  Swedes — Selma  Lagerlof  and  EUen  Key.  The 
responsibiHty  that  such  a  position  impHed  did  not 
appear  to  weigh  heavily  on  the  one  in  front  of  me. 
Who  or  what  this  person  might  be  who  came  knock- 
ing at  her  door  at  ten  o'clock  in  the  morning,  ob- 
viously she  had  not  the  remotest  notion,  but  she 
was  one  of  those  who  are  ready  to  take  a  chance. 
And,  quite  as  if  I  had  been  making  these  morning 
calls  for  years,  we  sailed  into  the  next  room,  where 

23 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

I  was  told  to  take  the  rocking-chair,  as  that  was 
what  Americans  liked. 

There  were  two  rooms,  one  after  the  other,  the 
first  of  which,  with  a  small  table  by  the  window 
looking  on  the  lake,  was  used  as  a  dining-room, 
the  other  as  a  library.  But  the  table  was  not  set, 
and  both  together  made  one  long  living-room  full 
of  air  and  sunlight,  books  and  pictures — evidently 
given  by  the  artists  themselves.  One  could  see 
without  examining  them  that  the  place  was  full  of 
things  which  had  been  thought  about  and  cared 
about,  and  were  there  for  a  reason.  The  result 
was  not  exactly  a  drawing-room,  and  certainly 
not  the  rather  prearranged  disarray  of  the  den  of 
the  very  Hterary,  but  a  comfortable  sort  of  com- 
bination of  the  two. 

Miss  Key — the  name  is  pronounced  "kay" 
and  is  derived  from  a  Scotch  ancestor,  MacKey, 
who  came  over  to  fight  with  the  great  Gustavus — 
sat  herself  in  a  straight-backed  chair  against  the 
wall.  She  wore  a  gray  wool  gown,  or  sack,  as  the 
satirical  might  describe  it,  which  belonged,  one 
would  say,  to  the  class  of  things  intended  to  be  use- 
ful and  to  merge  into  their  surroimdings  rather 
than  to  call  attention  to  themselves.  Her  white 
hair  was  parted  gravely  in  the  middle,  and  she  wore 
a  broad  lace  collar  and  two  or  three  hammered- 
silver  ornaments. 

24 


Comiii";  from  a  military  hors;e-.show  at  tlie  Stockholm  Stadium. 


1 


FAlen  Key  at  the  door  of  her  house  at  Alvastra. 


THE    ROAD    TO    RUSSIA 

She  looked  comfortable,  and  she  showed  at  once 
that  she  was  not  hard  to  get  at.  She  spoke  Eng- 
lish rapidly,  with  an  accent  and  occasional  slips, 
guessed  what  one  was  thinking  before  one  had 
completely  said  it,  and  not  only  had  her  answer 
ready  but  gave  the  impression  of  being  prepared 
to  say  exactly  what  she  thought  about  anything: 
a  woman  with  a  great  deal  of  vitaHty  and  cheer- 
fulness, who  enjoyed  living  and  believed  in  life  it- 
self. She  might  have  been  sixty-seven,  as  she  is 
said  to  be,  or  from  her  readiness  and  good  humor 
thirty-three,  or  twenty-eight,  for  she  had  arrived 
at  that  happy  age  when  ages  do  not  matter,  and 
one  is  interested  in  life  and  in  helping  make  the 
world  go  round. 

We  spoke  of  some  of  her  books  which  had  been 
translated  into  English,  of  "Love  and  Marriage" — 
"Lines  of  Life"  it  was  called  in  Swedish — which 
was  rather  widely  read  in  America  a  few  years  ago. 
This  book,  as  it  is  perhaps  scarcely  necessary  to 
recall,  was,  in  general,  a  plea  for  love  itself,  for  the 
dignity  of  hiunan  instincts  and  impulses  and  a 
recognition  of  the  fact  that  there  may  be  divinity 
in  them  as  well  as  in  what  is  called  spirit,  and  in 
health  a  natural  union  of  the  two.  It  protested 
against  the  human  energy  lost  to  the  race  in  rigidly 
subordinating  every  one  to  an  ideal  only  to  be 
realized  by  the  few,  and  those  not  always  the  most 

25 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

fit,  and  looked  forward  to  a  time  when  morality  of 
parents  should  be  measured  less  by  legal  rules  than 
by  their  love  for  each  other  and  the  earnestness 
with  which  they  assumed  responsibility  for  their 
children. 

Many  have  thought  and  written  toward  such 
an  ideal,  and  have  promptly  been  attacked  by  the 
puritanical,  while  the  vulgar  made  their  ideaUstic 
speculations  an  excuse  for  their  own  light-minded- 
ness. Such,  of  course,  was  the  experience  of  Ellen 
Key,  for  what  she  said  powerfully  and  beautifully 
could  easily  be  given  quite  another  meaning  if 
said  in  a  different  way. 

To  endeavor  to  repeat  her  comments  that  morn- 
ing about  this  aspect  of  her  work  would  be  only  to 
paraphrase  clumsily  what  any  one  can  find  better 
expressed  in  her  books.  The  significant  thing  was 
to  receive  the  same  impression  of  seriousness  and 
high  purpose  from  the  writer  as  from  the  writing 
itself.  It  is  not  important,  perhaps,  that  thinkers 
shall  embody  their  own  thoughts,  provided  the  latter 
are  important  in  themselves,  yet  I  do  feel  that  sug- 
gestions of  reform  in  such  matters  as  this  come  with 
less  authority  from  a  green-complexioned  lady 
smoking  hashish  than  from  a  regular  human  being 
like  Ellen  Key  in  such  a  home  as  this. 

The  great  American  secret  that  the  human  body 
stops  where  the  conventional  collar  begins  is  not 

26 


THE    ROAD    TO    RUSSIA 

shared  by  the  Swedes.  In  Stockhohn  the  print- 
shop  windows  are  full  of  pictures  by  Zom  and  his 
imitators:  jolly  peasant  nymphs  sunning  them- 
selves on  rocks,  splashing  each  other  in  the  surf, 
squinting  at  you  and  the  sunlight  from  the  grass 
by  the  riverside,  where  they  have  just  sUpped  out 
of  their  clothes — ^pictures  full  of  youth  and  health 
and  sunshine,  which  the  late  guardian  of  New 
York's  morals  would  never  for  a  moment  have 
allowed  ia  New  York,  and  which,  thanks  to  the 
encouragement  of  such  self-consciousness,  would 
doubtless  block  the  sidewalk  if  they  were  put  on 
view,  but  which  scarcely  attract  a  glance  here 
from  the  street  boys  as  they  pass  by. 

Bath  attendants  in  the  Stockholm  hotels  and 
pubHc  bath-houses  are  generally  women.  These 
white-armed  Brunhildas  pursue  into  the  nether- 
most comer  of  the  bathi'oom  the  trembling  Amer- 
ican— trembling  not  so  much  from  modesty  perhaps 
as  at  the  poverty  of  his  own  ignoble  and  clothes- 
degenerated  shape — and  there  flop  him  about  and 
scrub  him  as  if  he  were  so  many  square  yards  of 
kitchen  floor.  At  family  bathing-places — that  is 
to  say,  places  where  only  one  family  swim — bath- 
ing-suits are  not  infrequently  dispensed  with  alto- 
gether, and  the  rocks  and  blue  waters  of  the  archi- 
pelago between  Stockholm  and  the  sea  are  full  in 
summer,  so  one  is  told,  of  these  "pink  seals." 

27 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

On  some  such  atmospheric  differences  as  these 
is  doubtless  based  the  generahzation  often  heard 
from  returning  tourists  that  the  Swedes  are  quite 
unmoral,  and  that  it  is  no  disgrace  to  child  or  parent 
whether  the  parents  be  married  or  not.  I  asked 
Miss  Key  how  this  might  be.  She  answered  that 
among  the  upper  classes  conventions  were  similar 
to  ours,  but  that  the  peasants  looked  at  such  things 
very  simply.  With  them  it  was  the  child  which 
often  brought  about  the  marriage  ceremony,  or 
indeed  the  ceremony  might  follow  it,  the  desire 
of  the  parents  to  take  care  of  their  child  being  the 
natural  basis  on  which  they  built  their  home. 

This  accent  on  the  importance  of  the  child  leads 
without  much  difficulty  to  the  notion  encouraged 
by  some  and  amusingly  used  in  Mr.  Shaw's  "Man 
and  Superman,"  according  to  which  woman  is  the 
pursuer  and  man  at  best  the  mere  means  to  an 
end.  Miss  Key  showed  more  feeling  over  this 
than  over  anything  she  talked  about.  The  idea — 
this  Schrei  nach  dem  Kind,  which,  she  said,  was 
rather  a  fad  in  Germany  ten  or  fifteen  years  ago — 
was  to  her  detestable.  If  love  was  not  to  be  a  sort 
of  rehgion  and  the  man  and  woman  together  round 
the  child,  to  build  a  home,  what  was  the  use — 
"what  do  such  women  live  for?"  she  asked. 

The  Conservative  papers  had  criticised  Miss 
Key  for  her  un-Swedish  or  pro-Ally  leanings,  and 

28 


THE    ROAD    TO    RUSSIA 

she  would  have  been  criticised  in  the  same  way  at 
home,  for  being  pro-German.  In  other  words,  she 
looked  at  the  war  as  a  humanist  and  knew  too  much 
of  the  fine  qualities  of  all  the  people  engaged  and 
of  the  mixed  justice  of  their  behavior  since  the  war 
to  swallow  the  usual  campaign  of  hate  against 
either  side.  She  spoke  of  Romain  Rolland,  with 
whose  ideas,  I  should  say,  she  largely  agreed.  His 
picture  was  on  the  wall,  and  she  remarked  that  his 
was  the  most  difficult  kind  of  courage — to  set  your- 
self against  the  tide  in  your  own  country  in  time 
of  war.  At  the  same  time  she  was  by  no  means 
ready  to  faU  in  with  every  movement  for  peace. 
Only  a  day  or  two  before,  she  had  declined  a  re- 
quest to  write  an  appeal  for  peace  to  be  signed 
by  the  women  of  the  world. 

"We  might  sign  it,"  she  said,  "but  we  could 
not  get  the  women  of  France  or  Germany  or  Eng- 
land to  sign  it.    So  what  meaning  would  it  have?" 

I  spoke  of  the  idea  of  non-resistance — that  by 
refusing  to  fight  you  made  fighting  absurd,  and 
nobody  would  fight  you — and  asked  if  such  theories 
did  not  ignore  fundamental  human  instincts. 

Miss  Key  said  that  doubtless  this  was  true, 
and  there  were  plenty  of  subjects  on  which  to  direct 
the  fighting  instinct,  but  that  the  instinct  of  the 
tiger  had  been  something  which  civilization  had 
been  trying  to  control  for  some  time.     Between 

29 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

individuals  and  small  groups  of  people  difficulties 
were  already  referred  to  a  higher  power — it  was  no 
longer  a  disgrace  not  to  fight  a  duel;  the  man  who 
proposed  a  duel  in  England  or  America  would  sim- 
ply be  laughed  at. 

"The  men  of  this  landscape  [Miss  Key  here 
quaintly  transliterated  the  Swedish  word  landscap, 
which  means  "province"]  used  to  go  across  the  lake 
and  attack  men  of  the  other  landscape.  Now  that 
is  not  even  thought  of — the  national  power  makes 
it  impossible.  The  trouble  with  peace  advocates 
to-day  is  that  they  have  only  their  desire  for  peace, 
and  that  we  have  as  yet  organized  no  higher  power 
to  appeal  to." 

We  had  talked  for  an  hour  or  so  when  Miss 
Key  hopped  up,  put  a  little  kerchief  on  her  head, 
and  suggested  that  we  go  out  and  see  the  view. 
We  looked  at  that  and  at  the  little  toy-roof  tacked 
to  one  of  the  trees  under  which  she  sat  on  the  ground 
and  read.  We  walked  far  away  down  into  the 
wood  under  the  beeches,  talking  of  the  effect  of 
war  on  democracy,  the  present  crisis  in  Sweden, 
quaintly  mixed  up  with  views  of  the  lake,  liUes, 
and  anemones. 

Back  over  her  shoulder,  as  she  trudged  on,  Miss 
Key  spoke  of  the  Russians — a  gifted  people,  of 
fascinating  possibilities,  not  tired  like  some  other 
races,  indeed   scarcely  yet  begun.     The  lack  of 

30 


THE    ROAD    TO    RUSSIA 

organization,  all  the  slackness,  dirt,  corruption, 
and  stupidity — these  could  not  be  changed  in  a 
day.  "But  the  Russian  soul,  yes — I  believe  in 
that,"  she  said. 

It  was  beautiful  out  there,  under  the  great  gray 
beech-trees,  the  ground  covered,  literally,  with 
hepaticas,  violets,  and  anemones.  Prince  Eugene, 
a  painter  as  well  as  brother  of  the  King,  had  once, 
she  said,  made  a  picture  of  it. 

My  train  left  at  two  o'clock,  and  I  intended  to 
walk  back,  but  Miss  Key  insisted  that  I  must 
have  a  bite  first.  She  had  gone  to  the  kitchen 
to  order  tea,  when  she  popped  her  head  through 
the  door  to  ask  if  I  wouldn't  rather  have  chocolate. 
Decidedly  yes,  and  again  she  disappeared,  only  to 
pop  back  and  ask  if  I  would  rather  have  it  made 
with  water  and  then  add  cream,  or  made  with 
milk.  I  said  milk,  and  so  it  was,  and  we  had  it 
with  Swedish  brown  bread  and  butter  at  the  table 
by  the  window  looking  out  on  the  lake.  That 
table  must  be  a  great  place  to  have  breakfast  on 
a  sunny  summer  morning. 

The  chocolate  finished,  there  was  just  time  to 
say  good-by  and  run,  without  seeing  the  statue 
on  the  balcony  up-stairs  or  the  waves  painted  on 
the  bathroom  door,  or  some  of  the  other  things 
which  had  interested  the  ladies  from  Finland.  As 
we  stood  m  the  hall  I  looked  up  at  the  mottoes 

31 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

on  the  walls,  and  IVIiss  Key  translated  them.  Those 
on  the  sides  were  from  a  Finnish  poet,  and  about 
one's  country.  Opposite  the  door  was  Goethe's 
"Memento  Vivere." 

"They  generally  say  'remember  to  die,'  but  he 
thought  it  was  just  as  important  to  remember  to 
live,"  said  Miss  Key.  Over  the  front  door  was  a 
phrase  in  Swedish,  the  sense  of  which  was  that 
the  time  to  begin  living  was  now. 

"That  is  my  philosophy,"  she  said. 


32 


II 

WHITE  NIGHTS 

There  are  few  places  where  there  are  so  many  gloomy,  strong,  and 
queer  influences  on  the  soul  of  man  as  in  Petersburg.     The  mere  in- 
fiuences  of  climate  mean  so  much ;  then  it  is  the  administrative  cenirCf 
of  all  Russia.  .  .  . — Dostoyevski. 

The  white  nights  come  with  spring.  By  June 
there  is  ahnost  no  night  at  all,  only  a  sort  of  deeper 
twilight  between  twelve  and  two,  when  another 
day  is  dawning.  The  sun  is  still  well  up  in  the 
sky  as  you  go  to  the  theatre.  When  you  drift  out 
into  the  refreshment-room,  after  the  third  act, 
for  caviare  and  smoked-salmon  sandwiches  and 
tea  and  kvass,  with  that  winter-night  feeling  which 
the  theatre  lights  and  warmth  are  likely  to  give 
an  American,  there,  through  a  gap  in  the  curtains, 
still  shine  the  daylight  and  white  walls  of  the 
Petrograd  streets.  Walking  home,  toward  mid- 
night, you  can  still  read  the  players'  names  in  the 
small  t3^e  of  the  programme,  with  what  is  left 
of  the  daylight.  It  is  light,  yet  not  day;  still,  yet 
not  night,  but  a  strange,  half-lit  interval  between, 
theatrical  as  those  amber  tmlights  that  come  some- 
times before  summer  wind-storms  on  the  prairies. 
The  tops  of  things,  gilded  domes  fai'  down  the 

33 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

street,  the  thin  gold  spire  of  the  Admiralty,  are 
touched  with  a  light  like  that  which  touches  moun- 
tain-peaks before  sunrise.  Walls  facing  the  west 
are  lit  as  if  by  the  rising  sun.  Those  just  across 
the  street,  on  the  other  hand,  everytliing  on  the 
west  horizon,  the  whole  sky-line  across  the  Neva, 
is  in  black  silhouette.  Coming  down  the  Moika 
Canal  from  the  Opera,  the  great  dome  of  St.  Isaac's 
is  a  colossal  dusty  amethyst.  A  moment  later,  di- 
rectly beneath  it,  it  is  as  dead  and  black  as  a  burnt- 
out  volcano. 

The  light  brings  a  strange  alertness.  It  is  as  if 
one  had  a  sort  of  second  sight,  had  drunk  something 
which  turned  other  people's  night  into  a  magic 
sort  of  personal  day.  One  walks  on  and  on — though 
it  is  bedtime,  why  go  to  bed? — down  past  the  wist- 
ful bright  spire  of  the  Admiralt}^,  past  the  great 
red  piles  of  the  Winter  Palace  and  the  War  and  For- 
eign Offices,  and  along  the  river. 

The  broad  Neva  is  empty,  the  huge  ai'ks  that 
come  down  from  the  birch  forests,  piled  with  fire- 
wood, sleep  along  the  river- wall.  Across  the  river 
the  roofs  are  cut  out  of  dark-blue  cardboard  except 
where  the  golden  needle  of  the  Church  of  Peter 
and  Paul  picks  up  the  sun.  On  the  curved  stone 
benches  built  into  the  river-wall,  facing  the  Winter 
Palace  and  consulates  and  embassies,  boys  and 
girls,  the  boys  in  students'  military  caps  and  long 

34 


Looking  down  one  of  Petrograd's  canals  toward  the  dome  of  St.  Isaac's. 


Real  Russia — Sunday  picnic-parties  on  a  river  near  Moscow. 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

dark  overcoats,  sit  whispering,  making  love,  plan- 
ning Russia's  future,  perhaps,  in  the  face  of  that 
long  row  of  cold  stones.  One  feels  strangely  wide- 
awake and  yet  at  peace — night  without  its  gloom, 
day  without  its  worries  or  reality.  And  Petrograd 
becomes  beautiful,  mysterious,  and  kind — finds, 
at  last,  its  own  individuality.  Over  the  edge  of 
the  earth  somewhere  other  cities  have  their  hours — 
Broadway's  Hghts  are  flashing,  the  sun  is  blazing 
on  the  stucco  walls  and  blue  water  of  Rio.  But 
these  white  nights  are  Petrograd's  own,  and  belong 
to  it  and  this  cold  white  north. 

At  other  times,  particularly  in  those  never-end- 
ing rains  and  marrow-chilling  mists,  one  feels  the 
"queer  and  gloomy  influences"  that  Dostoyevski 
wrote  about.  A  queerer  place  for  a  great  modem 
city  it  would,  of  course,  be  hard  to  find.  Petrograd 
is  in  the  same  latitude  as  the  southern  end  of  Green- 
land. To  get  to  it,  nowadays,  you  must  go  almost 
to  the  Arctic  Circle  and  back  again — three  days' 
express-train  ride  from  Stockholm  north  to  Tomea 
and  then  south  again  through  Finland.  It  was 
built  on  swampy  islands  with  no  proper  drainage, 
and  even  now  your  hotel  room  shakes  when  a  heavy 
truck  drives  by.  Everything  to  eat,  drink,  bum, 
and  wear  comes  from  far  away.  It  is  dark  and  cold 
in  winter,  hot  and  smelly  in  the  short  summer,  and 
the  Baltic,  whenever  it  has  nothing  else  in  partic- 

35 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

ular  to  do,  pelts  it  with  mist  and  rain.  In  the  nearly 
continuous  daylight  of  summer,  things  grow  rapidly, 
yet  the  grass  and  dandelions  seem  only  here  on 
sufferance,  as  it  were,  and  the  wind  has  but  to  change 
and  one  feels  a  breath  like  that  out  of  an  ice-cavern. 
By  the  end  of  October  snow  is  back  again. 

It  is  not  so  much  a  town  as  an  act  of  will.  It 
was  the  will  of  Peter  the  Great,  determined  to  have 
his  "window  on  Europe,"  which  forced  it  down 
the  throats  of  the  jumble  of  peoples  he  was  beat- 
ing into  an  empire — there  is  a  delightful  picture 
in  the  Tretiakoff  Gallery  in  Moscow  of  the  Great 
Peter,  striding  along  in  the  rain,  trailing  his  soaked 
and  wind-swept  courtiers  behind  him — ^and  the 
cold,  stem  power  which  has  kept  that  empire 
together — I  speak,  of  course,  of  the  Petrograd  of 
yesterday — is  always  in  the  air.  It  is  the  place 
from  which  the  rest  of  Russia  is  governed,  and 
seems  to  consist — to  put  it  into  American  terms — 
of  post-offices  and  public  libraries.  A  stranger  in 
London  or  Paris  or  Biikharest  or  Buenos  Aires  can 
drift  up  and  down  the  streets  amused  and  enter- 
tained at  once — he  steps  into  a  warm  mist,  so  to 
speak,  of  neighborhood  feeling.  There  is  little  of 
the  sort  in  Petrograd.  The  Nevsky  is  a  fine, 
broad  thoroughfare,  but  the  crowds  there  seem 
mere  collections  of  detached  units.  They  do  not 
seem  to  be  saying,  as  people  do  in  the  famous  streets 

36 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

of  other  great  capitals — as  they  do,  indeed,  in  the 
narrower  streets  of  Moscow:  "This  is  our  street! 
This  is  where  we  hve !" 

Of  course  there  are  many  interesting  things  in 
Petrograd,  from  the  Old  Masters  in  the  Hermitage 
Museum  to  the  new  masters  of  politics  and  ballets. 
There  are  theatres,  the  concentrated  intellectuality 
that  gathers  in  any  great  city;  there  are  hospitable 
and  charming  people,  but  these  are  all  things  in- 
side of  walls  and  under  roofs  rather  than  outside 
them. 

Soldiers  were  everywhere  while  I  was  there — big 
blond  boys  in  long  tan  overcoats  with  flat  caps 
slapped  rakishly  over  one  ear.  They  drilled  in 
dozens  of  squares,  on  the  cobblestoned  space  below 
the  dome  of  St.  Isaac's — which  suggests  St.  Peter's 
and  Rome — and  marched  the  streets  day  and  night, 
singing  their  tremendous  Russian  songs. 

Three  or  four  files  started  the  air,  after  a  measure 
or  two  the  next  section  came  in,  and  so  on  down 
the  street  until  presently  the  whole  column  was 
boommg  a  sort  of  "round."  The  song,  wild  and 
melancholy  with  tremendous  basses,  went  down  the 
street  in  a  series  of  waves,  and  as  one  descended  in 
front  of  you  another  was  flung  to  the  housetops  a 
little  way  down  the  block. 

These  recruits  marched  slowly,  \\dth  a  curious  roll- 
ing of  the  shoulders  and  swinging  of  their  long  tan 

37 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

overcoats.  Their  feet  went  out  and  down  with  a 
snap — clop  .  .  .  clop — in  a  sort  of  modified  goose- 
step,  and  to  accent  the  rhythm  they  were  taught  to 
swing  the  free  arm,  the  one  not  carrying  the  rifle, 
in  a  wide,  slow  arc,  almost  up  to  the  opposite  shoulder 
and  back  again.  And  this  slow,  deliberate  reaching 
forward  and  setting  down  of  each  foot — one  recalled 
Kipling's  "bear  that  walks  like  a  man" — together 
with  the  long,  high  swing  of  the  closed  fist,  repeated 
by  innumerable  blond  giants  in  long,  swaying 
overcoats,  was  curious  and  impressive.  There  was 
something  more  than  accident  in  this,  or  the  drill- 
sergeant's  notions — something  at  once  tremendous 
and  quaint,  something  of  the  faith,  heaviness,  and 
slow,  imconquerable  power  of  Russia  itself. 

On  the  big,  dusty  parade-ground  out  toward 
the  British  Embassy  they  sprawled  in  open  order, 
firing  unloaded  rifles  at  imaginary  Germans,  or 
galloped  through  imaginary  charges  across  bits  of 
imitation  trench.  There  was  a  stufl'ed  figure,  like 
a  football  dummy,  in  front  of  the  trench,  with 
wooden  arms  so  arranged  with  springs  as  to  suggest 
enemy  bayonets.  The  recruit  was  supposed  to  charge 
the  dummy,  strike  aside  the  arms  to  left  and  right 
without  letting  them  strike  back  at  him,  bayonet 
the  dummy,  scramble  up  to  the  top  of  the  trench, 
jab  the  air  in  front,  drop  into  the  trench,  jab  to 
right  and  left,  then  scramble  out  and  come  to  at- 

38 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

tcntion.  A  drill-sergeaiit  stood  by  and  criticised 
technique. 

The  recruits  waited  in  little  squads — ^young 
peasants  just  raked  in  from  their  villages  and  awk- 
ward at  this  business  of  killing — and  charged  the 
dummy  one  by  one.  As  each  one's  turn  came  he 
galloped  forward,  bawling  a  lugubrious  sort  of 
battle-cry:  *'Waw — aw — aw — aw  ....'"  Slap — 
to  one  side — Slap,  the  other  side.  ^^OoJV*  He 
jabbed  the  straw  man,  scrambled  up  the  trench, 
panting  now — "OoJ  I  OoJ  T^ — to  each  side.  Down 
into  the  trench,  a  final  "Oof  !^^  and  out  again.  It 
was  a  curious  spectacle  on  a  bright  morning — the 
great  bare  space  covered  with  little  men,  galloping 
thus,  and  filling  the  air  with  their  embarrassed  and 
melancholy  bellowing. 

"Just  before  the  charge  they  are  all  atrem- 
ble."  ...  At  Contan's,  with  the  Rumanian  orches- 
tra playing,  a  young  Dutch  war  correspondent  who 
had  seen  a  great  deal  of  Russian  fighting,  and  even 
been  in  a  charge  himself  and  decorated  for  it,  was 
giving  his  impressions.  "The  mitrailleuse  makes 
them  angry;  all  at  once  they  seem  to  go  mad,  their 
eyes  bulge  out,  they  look  so  positively  frightful 
that  when  they  come  over  the  trenches  the  Aus- 
trians  simply  throw  up  their  hands.  They  are 
fearful,  those  faces — ^you  can't  imagine  how  ferocious 
— and  then  all  at  once,  when  the  charge  is  over, 

39 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

they  are  good  again,  and  they  march  back,  sleepy, 
good-natured  Russians.  .  .  ." 

Across  St.  Isaac's  Square,  past  my  hotel,  came 
trooping  eveiy  day  the  new  levies — ^peasants  in 
wrinkled  boots,  flat  caps,  and  fur  caps,  homespuns 
and  sheepsldns,  canying  their  teakettles  and  boxes 
just  as  they  had  been  dug  up  out  of  their  far-away 
villages.  Soldiers  with  bayonets  fixed  scuffled 
drowsily  along  in  front  of,  beside,  and  behind  them. 
There  was  generally  a  wagon  with  luggage,  and  a 
peasant  wife  or  two  shufiling  along  with  her  hus- 
band, or  trailing  behind  wiping  her  eyes.  And 
sometimes  a  shaggy  peasant  boy,  intoxicated  by 
the  sight  of  Petrograd  and  the  whole  tremendous 
adventure,  squatted  on  his  heels  and  began  kicking 
out  his  boots  one  after  the  other  in  honor  of  the 
great  city,  war,  and  life  in  general. 

In  the  theatre  one  forgets  the  city's  coldness 
and  constraint — possibly  one  of  the  reasons  why 
Russians  are  so  fond  of  the  theatre,  why  they  will 
listen  with  delight  to  long-drawn-out,  undramatic 
pieces,  provided  they  bring  some  of  the  warmth 
and  quaintness  and  deep  feeling  of  Russian  life 
itself.  I  remember  with  what  a  sense  of  surprise 
after  a  week  in  Petrograd  I  woke  up,  as  it  were, 
one  evening  in  the  theatre.  It  was  one  of  those 
genial  old  plays  of  Ostrovsky's  which  are  played 
in  Russia  year  in  and  year  out,  and  the  audience, 

40 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

happy  and  alert;  seemed  composed  of  quite  dif- 
ferent people  from  those  in  the  streets.  In  the 
long  intermissions  they  pom'ed  into  the  refresh- 
ment-rooms, where  samovars  were  steaming,  and 
had  tea  and  sandwiches  and  cakes,  went  back  for 
more  of  the  play,  returned  for  more  sandwiches 
and  tea,  just  as  they  mix  drama  with  sandwiches 
and  beer  in  Germany. 

Every  morning  long  lines  of  people  wait  for 
tickets  at  the  various  windows  in  the  great  Imperial 
Theatre — poorly  clad  girls  and  students,  dull, 
ordinary-looking  people  of  the  small-merchant 
class — and  the  great  auditorium,  with  its  five  bal- 
conies, is  packed  every  night.  There  are  plays  of 
Ostrovsky,  Turgenev,  and  Tolstoy — ^pieces  most 
Americans  never  heard  of,  but  as  well  known  to 
Russian  audiences  as  "Uncle  Tom's  Cabin."  The 
Russians  keep  on  likmg  such  plays — they  have 
the  quiet,  solid  permanence  which  in  America  is 
found  only  in  novels. 

Everything  in  these  imperial  theatres  has  an 
air  of  spaciousness,  solidity,  and  sound  tradition. 
The  rooms  on  the  stage  are  real  rooms — ^you  look 
through  one  into  another  just  as  large,  and  people 
come  down  a  real  stakway,  from  a  second-stoiy 
drawing-room  almost  as  completely  suggested  as 
the  big  reception-hall  into  which  they  descend. 
The  acting,  if  somewhat  conventionalized  in  com- 

41 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

parison  witli  the  more  original  and  progressive 
methods  of  the  Art  Tlieatre  in  Moscow,  is  always 
sound  and  admirable.  Every  performance  has  a 
certain  urbanity,  like  the  humor  of  Punch  or  the 
comedy  in  an  old-fashioned  three-volume  novel. 
There  are  no  absurdly  advertised  and  overacccnted 
stars  in  these  stock  companies.  It  is  a  life-work 
for  the  players,  their  place  in  the  imperial  scheme 
of  things.  They  have  traditions  to  live  up  to.  They 
are  all  known  to  the  audience,  and  have  been  known 
for  years;  they  are  its  friends,  faithful  servants  of 
the  public,  and  of  their  art. 

In  the  white  nights,  too,  people  go  to  the  islands 
— another  place  where  one  forgets  the  "queer  and 
gloomy  influences  of  Petersburg."  The  islands  are 
a  part  of  the  Neva  delta  given  over  to  boating- 
clubs,  summer  dachas,  and  restaurants  by  the 
water;  a  place  where  these  summer-starved  north 
Russians — and  Russians  are  all  fond  of  the  coun- 
try— can  flock  in  these  long  evenings  to  row  and 
swim,  to  eat  outdoors,  and  stroll  mider  the  birches 
of  Yelagin  Island,  listening  to  the  nightingales. 

The  endless  daylight  gives  a  novel  sense  of  leisure 
to  outdoor  things.  You  don't  have  to  hurry  home 
at  any  particular  time;  one  can  go  right  on  play- 
ing tennis  until  ten  o'clock,  and  there  are  swimming- 
parties  scattered  along  the  Neva  branches  until 
well  into  the  night.    A  constant  string  of  open  car- 

42 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

riages,  ramshackle  public  cabs,  driven  by  shaggy 
izvoschiks,  fancier  private  ones  with  a  fast,  satin- 
black  trotter  in  a  cobweb  harness  trimmed  with 
Cossack  silver,  go  pattering  across  the  bridge  toward 
Yelagin.  Some  go  to  Felician's  and  drink  champagne 
at  several  times  what  it  is  worth,  and  some  to  hum- 
bler places,  where  the  view  and  air  are  just  as  good, 
and  have  tea  and  kvass  and  cabbage  soup;  some 
spend  the  night  with  a  band  of  gypsies,  which  is 
supposed  to  be  the  wildest  adventure  of  all,  and 
some  merely  go  out  to  Yelagin  and  drive  round 
and  round. 

One  evening  at  Felician^s  it  poured  buckets  all 
through  dinner,  and  afterward,  in  the  freshly  washed 
amber  t\\dlight,  we  hailed  a  boatman  from  across 
the  river  and  went  rowing.  The  old  fellow  talked 
constantly.  He  had  three  sons  m  the  army;  one 
had  lost  an  arm  and  two  others  were  wounded. 
The  losses  had  been  terrible,  he  said — why,  in 
Moscow  there  was  a  whole  factory  fuU  of  wounded ! 
But  Russia  would  last  longer  than  Germany,  never- 
theless. There  were  plenty  of  Germans  in  Petro- 
grad — the  Russians  themselves  wouldn't  send  them 
out.    There  was  no  such  thing  as  an  honest  man. 

Across  the  river  was  a  tall  brick  tower  or  chimney 
with  a  sort  of  spiral  railway  down  the  side,  which 
had  cost  the  man  who  built  it  fifteen  thousand 
rubles.    He  intended  it  as  an  amusement  scheme 

43 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

and  thought  the  government  would  decorate  him 
for  it,  but  people  didn't  take  to  it,  the  government 
didn't  decorate  him,  so  he  hanged  himself. 

And  this,  in  the  tranquil  white  night,  with  the 
birches  on  the  river-bank,  and  the  melancholy 
song  about  a  factory  girl  who  committed  suicide 
(very  popular  with  young  folks'  picnic-parties), 
coming  across  the  water  seemed,  somehow,  tre- 
mendously Russian.  They  appear  to  live  by  their 
feelings  more  than  we  do  and  have  great  ups  and 
downs.  Go  into  a  traktir,  one  of  those  shabby  tea- 
houses where  cabmen,  marketmen,  women  car- 
conductors,  and  the  like  used  to  drink  vodka  and 
now  drink  tea.  The  faces  are  extraordinary,  differ- 
ent from  those  even  in  the  poorest  quarters  of  our 
cities.  There  are  men  who  look  like  Tolstoy  and  sit 
staring  into  space  and  looking  like  Tolstoy  for  an 
hour  at  a  time.  A  girl  leans  on  her  elbow  with  a 
hand  thrust  into  her  hair  as  if  she  were  playing  a 
tragic  third  act.  Another  girl  comes  in.  touches  her, 
and  in  a  flash  she  bursts  into  a  gale  of  high  spirits. 
They  change  quickly,  but  in  such  a  company  you 
will  find  little  of  that  happy-go-luckiness,  that 
slangy  defiance  of  fate,  characteristic  of  English  and 
Americans.  More  often  they  seem  preoccupied  in 
the  everj^-day  world,  fiercely  analyzing  life,  and 
ready,  over  things  which  would  only  jar  us  slightly, 
to  go  wild  with  enthusiasm  or  to  cut  their  throats. 

44 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

They  carry  one  train  of  thought,  particularly 
gloomy  thought,  to  unheard-of  lengths.  You  have 
a  blue  Monday  and  let  it  go  at  that,  but  Mr.  Art- 
zibashev  has  a  blue  Monday,  and  he  writes  "The 
Breaking  Point,"  in  which  everybody  decides  that 
life  is  not  worth  living  and  kills  himself.  Of  course 
Mr.  Artzibashev  is  not  quite  sincere,  because  if 
he  really  believed  his  theory  he  would  not  spend 
all  the  patient  and  highly  concentrated  intellec- 
tual effort  necessaiy  to  write  thi-ee  or  four  hundred 
interesting  pages  proving  it.  The  answer  to  the 
book  is  the  book  itself.  Mr.  Artzibashev  finished  it. 
He  has  power,  nevertheless,  and  there  was,  indeed, 
a  sort  of  epidemic  of  suicide  of  which  his  book  was 
a  reflection.  It,  and  work  similar  to  Artzibashev's, 
came  with  the  reaction  from  the  unsuccessful  revo- 
lution of  1905. 

Out  at  the  islands,  too,  is  a  Y.  M.  C.  A.  athletic 
field,  and  on  one  of  these  white  nights  I  watched 
Russian  boys  in  running  clothes  go  through  a  setting- 
up  drill  with  an  American  instructor,  and  took  a 
turn  with  them  myself  around  the  cinder  path. 
Afterward  there  were  tea  and  sandwiches,  with  a 
samovar  at  the  head  of  the  table,  Russian  fashion, 
and  the  army  hydroaeroplanes  from  the  practice 
camp  near  by  drumming  up  and  circling  overhead 
to  settle  back  like  ducks  into  the  river. 

Russian  boys  know  so  little  about  sports  and 

45 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

takingicare  of  their  bodies  that  any  such  work  as 
this  has  more  than  ordinary  interest  and  value. 
The  Y.  M.  C.  A.  has  a  good  gymnasium  in  Petro- 
grad,  and  reading  and  lecture  rooms.  There  was 
no  end  to  their  appetite  for  lectures,  the  superin- 
tendent said,  lectures  of  any  length,  on  almost  any 
subject.  I  said  something  about  the  comparatively 
greater  interest  Russians  had  in  speculative  things. 
Yes,  the  superintendent  said,  it  was  partly  that,  and 
then  also  they  had  almost  no  sports  or  games,  and 
few  of  the  ones  they  reached  had  the  American 
boy's  common-school  education. 

Any  such  work  has  to  proceed  with  great  tact 
where  there  is  such  suspicion  of  possible  religious 
or  political  propaganda  as  there  was  under  the 
old  regime.  Even  the  usual  name  was  not  used, 
and  the  organization  was  known  by  the  Russian 
word  for  lighthouse.  To  fit  local  conditions  they 
also  had  a  distinguished  patron  who  made  himself 
responsible,  in  a  way,  for  the  good  behavior  of  the 
organization  under  his  name,  and  was  an  easy, 
concrete  head  to  which  complaints  could  be  di- 
rected. 

This  use  of  a  patron  suggests  another  quaint 
and  thoroughly  Russian  institution,  the  "respon- 
sible editor."  Newspapers  were  so  much  embar- 
rassed by  having  their  editor  lugged  off  to  jail  that 
they  hit  on  the  idea  of  having  two  editors — an 

46 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

anonjTnous  one  who  did  the  real  work  and  a  figure- 
head who  was  paid  a  nominal  salary  to  have  his 
name  printed  at  the  top  of  the  editorial  page,  and 
to  go  to  jail  when  the  authorities  demanded  that 
the  editor  be  arrested. 

Americans  were  also  conducting  a  creche  for 
refugee  children  and  a  little  military  hospital.  The 
creche  rent  the  American  colony  asunder,  as  such 
enterprises  sometimes  do,  and  while  I  was  in  Petro- 
grad  the  ladies  of  one  faction  were  not  speaking 
to  those  of  the  other,  and  when  invited  to  dine  at 
the  same  house  were  immediately  prostrated  with 
headaches.  The  children  were  well  looked  after, 
nevertheless,  and  the  soldiers  who  got  into  the 
hospital,  which  seemed  less  productive  of  dissension, 
were  lucky  enough.  I  saw  the  convalescent  ones, 
big,  devoted  children,  learning  simple  arithmetic 
and  copying  letters  from  a  child's  primer  as  care- 
fully as  if  they  were  illuminating  manuscripts. 

Those  who  could,  wrote  letters  after  they  were 
discharged,  on  scraps  of  paper,  with  nearly  every 
word  misspelled,  yet  full  of  their  peasant  devout- 
ness  and  gratitude.  One  of  the  American  ladies 
who  knew  Russian  had  translated  and  printed  in 
a  little  pamphlet  a  number  of  these  letters: 

Much  esteemed  Madame  Directress  of  the  Hospital  of 
the  American  Colony,  from  Fedor  Stochilin,  treated  by  you: 
I  bow  low  to  you,  and  I  thank  you  for  your  kind  care  of  me 

47 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

and  all  the  wounded.  Now  my  whole  family  prays  to  God 
for  you,  much  respected  baroness,  and  my  mother  is  always 
talking  of  the  good  and  kind  Barinya  and  sister,  and  even 
tells  all  through  the  village  about  you.  And  I  bow  low  from 
my  waist  to  the  other  sisters  and  also  thank  them  many 
times,  and  again  I  greet  Nikolai  and  all  my  sick  comrades. 
I  wish  them  everything  good  and  a  quick  recovery  and  to 
return  home  soon  and  see  their  dear  country  where  we  were 
born  and  grew  up;  only  fate  was  not  very  kind  to  us.  .  .  . 

Greetings,  my  dear  sister;  I  hasten  to  assure  you  of  my 
deepest  respect  and  with  great  love  I  bow  to  you  and  I  wish 
you  from  God  good  health,  quick  and  happy  success  in  the 
work  of  your  hands.  I  inform  you,  my  dear  sister,  that  I 
received  the  money  you  sent  to  me — four  rubles — and  I 
express  my  deepest  gratitude  to  you  and  to  the  whole  Com- 
mittee of  the  American  Colony.  I  was  surprised  and  deeply 
touched  by  these  four  rubles,  for  the  things  I  had  made 
were  very  few,  and  I  did  not  ask  to  have  money  sent  me  for 
them.  For  this  reason  I  am  surprised  and  deeply  touched, 
not  only  I  but  all  of  my  family,  that  among  us  Russians 
there  are  also  foreigners  who  enter  so  into  the  needs  of  our 
dear  defenders  of  the  fatherland.  .  .  .  When  I  feel  home- 
sick I  look  at  the  picture  and,  closing  my  eyes  I  see  one  sister 
and  another  and  the  third  moving  about.  I  see  the  ventilator 
buzzing,  the  aeroplane  [a  toy  aeroplane  the  soldier  had 
made  himself]  turning  from  side  to  side,  and  it  seems  as  if 
I  were  back  in  our  dear  lazaret,  and  this  comes  very  often 
to  my  mind.  .  .  . 

Greetings  and  greetings,  much  esteemed  Barinya.  I 
send  you  my  respects  with  love  and  a  bow  from  the  white 
face  down  to  the  moist  earth.  ...  I  arrived,  thank  God, 
all  right.    My  parents  and  dear  children  met  me  as  if  I  had 

48 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

come  from  the  other  world;  they  did  not  know  what  to  do; 
they  were  very  happy  to  see  me  again.  But  now,  dear 
Barinya,  I  do  not  know  how  I  shall  live.  Things  are  very 
bad  with  me.  My  wife  planted  five  dessiatines  of  wheat, 
but  God  was  not  good  to  her  and  the  little  children  and 
only  thirty-eight  poods  of  grain  was  gathered.  And  besides 
that  there  is  nothing.  ...  I  am  not  able  to  work,  no  pen- 
sion has  been  given  yet,  and  it  is  uncertain  when  there  will 
be  one.  Now  the  snow  is  very  deep  here,  so  that  I  am  un- 
able to  walk.    It  is  very  difficult  and  very  bad.  .  .  . 

(Written  from  the  hospital  to  a  member  of  the 
colony.) 

Greetings,  most  kind  lady,  and  the  lowest  of  bows.  We 
bow  to  the  moist  earth,  and  we  kiss  your  feet  and  your  white 
hands,  and  we  wish  from  our  hearts  everything  good,  from 
the  Lord  God  good  health.  Most  kind  and  dear  Barinya, 
when  we  heard  of  your  unfortunate  accident  we  were  very 
sad;  I  even  cried.  We  were  very  sorry;  we  are  as  sorry  as 
if  you  were  our  own  mother.  You  take  trouble  for  us  like 
our  own  mother.  Dear  and  precious  Barinya,  we  cannot 
express  in  words  our  gratitude  for  your  kind  and  good  acts 
to  us;  we  are  very  sorry  for  you  and  will  ask  in  our  prayers 
that  God  will  be  gracious  to  you  and  will  give  you  health. 
We  await  you  impatiently  like  our  own  mother.  And  now 
good-by,  dearly  loved  and  much  esteemed  Barinya;  we  will 
pray  God  for  your  recovery. 

D.  M.  Zinevitch  and  also  F.  Chergenko  and  also  all  the 
woimded.  We  wish  you  all  that  we  could  wish  for  our- 
selves. .  .  . 

The  Petrograd  and  Moscow  hotels  were  buzzing 
with  agents  and  commercial  scouts.     There  were 

49 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

all  sorts  of  Britishers — for  England  was  fighting 
Germany  here  as  bitterly  as  in  the  field — and  a 
good  many  Americans.  Some  of  these  pioneers 
spoke  Russian,  understood  Russian  customs  and 
psychology,  spent  tact  and  money  lavishl}^  to  make 
friends  in  high  places — were,  in  short,  accomplished 
diplomats  and  reaped  corresponding  rewards.  Others, 
amusing  or  pathetic  as  one  looked  at  it,  wandered 
about  like  lost  sheep,  more  helpless  even  than  the 
down-trodden  race  of  war  correspondents,  who  at 
least  were  likely  to  speak  a  little  French  and  to  be 
used  to  landuig  on  their  feet  in  unaccustomed  places, 
and  butted  their  heads  in  vain  against  official  red 
tape,  indolence,  and  inaction. 

It  was  interesting  to  watch  the  change  come 
over  Americans — see  them  arrive  full  of  steam 
and  the  notion  of  getting  a  lot  done  in  a  hurry, 
and  gradually  lose  their  energy  and  optimism  until 
they  either  went  home  defeated  or  got  a  sort  of 
second  wind,  and  understood  that  the  game  in 
Russia  was  a  new  one  and  called  for  an  amount  of 
patience,  leisure,  politeness,  and  apparently  aim- 
less palavering  which  they  never  dreamed  of  at 
home.  The  differences  are  not  altogether  unlike 
those  which  American  commercial  travellers  en- 
counter in  Spanish  America.  A  knowledge  of 
Russian  is  the  fundamental  need;  then  the  out- 
sider must  be  prepared  for  interminable  waiting, 

50 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

and  he  should  learn  the  trick  of  looking  at  least 
as  if  he  had  no  doubts  and  liked  it. 

Some  one  said,  one  day,  that  the  difference  be- 
tween Russia  and  Germany  was  this:  In  Germany 
everything  was  forbidden — verboten;  in  Russia  noth- 
ing was  forbidden;  on  the  other  hand,  nothing  was 
permitted.  There  is  a  bureaucratic  type  whose 
psychology  quite  baffles  the  go-ahead  Westerner. 
Whether  these  men  are  subtle  or  merely  stupid 
he  never  can  tell,  but  a  complete  vagueness  seems 
to  be  their  end  and  aim.  Even  when  they  speak 
English  they  do  not  seem  to  understand  it;  they 
gaze,  with  the  curious  preoccupation  of  a  profes- 
sional boxer,  at  the  ceiling  or  one's  feet  or  at  noth- 
ing in  particular,  and  seem  determined  to  escape 
the  concrete  and  definite.  In  the  blandest  fashion 
they  forget  to-day  what  they  said  yesterday  and 
agree  on  something  to-day  only  to  point  out  to- 
morrow, in  the  same  bland  way,  some  antecedent 
bit  of  red  tape  which  throws  out  the  whole  matter. 
Occasionally  there  is  a  lingering  Byzantine  who 
seems  capable  of  anjrthing,  like  the  wicked  little 
girl  in  the  "Brothers  Karamazov,"  who  dreamed  of 
"eating  pineapple  compote  while  people  were  being 
crucified  in  the  courtyard."  This  type  seems  the 
product  of  a  life  devoted  to  devising  ways  to  keep 
people  from  doing  things — one  way  being  to  oppose 
this  impersonal,  slightly  yielding  mountain  of  op- 

51 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

position,  like  a  vast  heap  of  putty,  against  which 
the  fretful  invader  bangs  his  head  in  vain. 

Such  encounters  are,  to  be  sure,  incidental  dis- 
cords in  a  rather  general  welcome.  This  vast  agricul- 
tural empire,  which  imports  most  of  its  manufac- 
tured goods,  presents  conditions  often  very  like 
those  in  our  own  West,  and  American  trade  is, 
generally  spealdng,  encouraged,  as  our  agricultural 
implement  and  automobile  manufacturers  have  al- 
ready found  out. 

Moscow  is  a  night's  ride  south  of  Petrograd, 
twelve  hours'  express-train  journey  into  the  real 
Russia.  On  one  trip  down  I  shared  a  coupe  with 
a  3^oung  officer,  back  on  furlough,  who  lived  in 
Moscow  and  thought  little  of  Petrograd.  The  war 
was  returning  Russia  to  the  Russians,  he  said,  and 
when  it  was  over  Moscow  would  be  made  the  cap- 
ital. This  seemed  improbable,  yet  Moscow  is  the 
natural  capital,  geographically,  and  in  many  senti- 
mental ways  as  well. 

It  is  a  big,  genial,  easy-going  village  of  a  million 
people,  compared  with  cold,  cosmopolitan  Petro- 
grad. And  the  moment  one  sees  the  ancient,  saw- 
tooth Tatar  walls  of  the  Ej^emlin,  and  the  gilded 
domes  of  the  imiumerable  churches,  and  the  big 
market  with  its  fresh  fish  and  crabs  and  fruit,  in  the 
very  centre  of  the  town  beside  the  big  hotels,  and 
drives  through  the  narrow,  genial  streets  with  their 

52 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

endless  shrines  and  bells,  there  is  no  doubt  that 
one  is  at  last  in  Russia.  It  is  something  to  be  in 
Moscow  on  one  of  the  great  church  days,  when 
all  the  bells  are  ringing,  even  the  big  bass  ones. 
The  whole  city  rumbles  and  vibrates  with  their 
music;  there  is  a  continuous  dull  roar  like  that  of 
trains  rolling  over  far-off  bridges;  the  very  air 
shakes  with  the  vast  diapason. 

I  shall  speak  later  of  one  of  the  great  cotton- 
mills  of  this  city  of  merchants  and  cotton-spinners, 
and  of  its  Art  Theatre.  The  Tretiakoff  Gallery 
is  another  institution.  It  was  given  to  the  city 
by  a  member  of  one  of  the  old  merchant  families, 
and,  instead  of  the  usual  groups  of  western  European 
Schools  found  in  most  art  museums,  is  filled  almost 
entirely  with  Russian  pictures.  These  painters  are 
all  Russians  of  our  own  times,  and  their  work,  to  a 
stranger  from  the  west,  has  much  of  the  stirring, 
unexpected  quality  of  Russian  stories  and  novels. 

Set  a  bit  above  the  city  behind  ancient  Tatar 
ramparts,  the  Kremlin  churches  lift  their  little 
gilded  domes  to  the  sun.  They  are  old  and  beau- 
tiful. With  their  gold  and  candle-light  and  some 
dusty  shaft  of  daylight,  which  itself  seems  old, 
descending  sharply  from  a  barred  slit  far  overhead, 
there  is  nothing  in  them  that  belongs  to  our  century 
or  to  the  west  that  doesn't  seem  to  have  been  de- 
voutly hammered  out  by  hand  four  or  five  hundred 

53 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

years  ago  by  people  whose  history,  one  might  say, 
most  of  us  know  nothing  about. 

Peasant  pilgrims,  shaggy  and  a  trifle  smelly, 
from  hundreds  of  miles  away,  perhaps,  shuffle  in 
and,  taking  towels  from  their  packs,  mop  their 
faces  and  necks,  before  starting  in  to  pray.  Peasant 
mothers  come  with  their  babies  and  little  children 
to  kiss  the  tombs  of  the  saints,  to  lift  up  the  little 
children  and  press  their  lips  to  the  hands  of  the 
saints'  images,  or  to  lay  their  babies  on  the  picture 
of  St.  Michael  on  the  top  of  his  tomb  and  leave 
them  there  for  a  moment's  sanctification.  There 
are  forty-seven  tombs  of  tsars  in  one  of  these  little 
Kremlin  churches,  and  you  will  see  a  devout  peasant 
woman  go  down  the  line  kneeling  and  kissing  each 
one. 

In  few  places  is  Russia's  different  religious  past  felt 
more  strongly  than  in  Kiev,  in  the  Kievo-Petcher- 
skaya  Lavra,  the  ancient  monasteiy  there.  With 
its  chapels  and  pleasant  old  gardens — it  was  founded 
in  1062 — it  is  set  on  one  of  the  hills  overlooking  the 
Dnieper,  and  underneath  the  buildings  and  twist- 
ing far  underground  are  the  galleries  and  caves 
where  the  old  saints  had  themselves  walled  up, 
except  for  a  little  slit  through  which  food  and  water 
were  passed,  and  there  lived  out  their  sacrificial 
lives. 

Their  mummies,  wrapped  in  red  silk,  are  laid 

54 


> 


c3 


> 
o 


C  "3 
CD     C3 


X 

H 


o 
o 


o 

■j: 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

outside  these  underground  cells,  and  in  the  dim 
candle-light  a  string  of  devout  people — ^many  of 
them  soldiers  in  uniform — shuffles  by  to  kneel  and 
kiss  the  covered  folded  hands.  The  silk  coverings 
must  be  changed  every  year,  worn  out  by  this 
reverent  kissing.  There  are  monasteries  and  old 
chapels  in  the  west,  but  they  go  back  to  a  past 
with  which  we  are  more  or  less  familiar — one  has 
a  hazy  notion,  at  any  rate,  of  French  and  Italian 
and  Spanish  religious  history.  Of  the  Eastern 
Church  and  the  life  and  legends  that  went  with 
it  most  of  us  know  little,  and  there  is  a  curious 
impressiveness  about  this  unfamiliar  antiquity — 
frescoed  hands  worn  off  by  centuries  of  Slavic 
kissing,  of  saints  whose  names  we  never  even  heard 
of — sudden  vistas  going  back  to  Byzantium  in- 
stead of  Rome. 

Kiev  is  not  only  an  ancient  and  holy  city — Rus- 
sian history  began  here,  indeed,  in  the  ninth  cen- 
tury— it  is  also  a  busy  modem  one — the  main  gate- 
way to  the  west  of  Europe — and  the  streets  are  full 
of  traffic  and  moving-picture  shows.  There  is  a 
neighborhood  feeling  here,  too,  and  on  another  of 
the  hills  overlooking  the  river  a  particularly  at- 
tractive sort  of  restaurant-park  where  everybody 
flocks  in  the  evening  to  promenade  and  see  and  be 
seen. 

I  shall  speak  presently  of  a  prison-camp  in  the 

55 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

outskirts  of  the  city,  and  with  Kiev  is  associated 
another  adventure — a  swim  in  the  Dnieper — quite 
characteristic  of  a  Russian  summer. 

Kiev  is  on  the  bluffs  of  the  west  bank.  The  east 
shore  of  the  river  consists  of  low  sand-flats,  an  ideal 
bathmg-place,  and  people  rowed  across  from  Kiev, 
walked  up  the  sand  a  bit,  and  went  into  the  river 
au  naturel,  like  small  boys  in  the  old  swimming- 
hole.  A  diminutive  youngster  of  a  ferryman  rowed 
me  across,  and  as  the  boat  grounded  on  the  flats 
a  big,  Rubens-like  woman,  holding  a  wad  of  skirt 
in  front  of  her,  somewhat  after  the  manner  of  a 
baseball  catcher's  shield,  was  wading  into  the 
stream.  Three  tiny  daughters,  all  tanned  from  head 
to  foot  a  beautiful  Indian  brown,  splashed  after 
her.  When  the  mother  got  above  her  knees  she 
handed  the  shield  to  one  of  the  children,  who  paddled 
back  to  shore  with  it,  while  mamma,  with  the  air 
of  a  happy  walrus,  toppled  into  the  stream. 

I  picked  out  a  good  bit  of  sand,  planted  my  stick 
therein,  hung  my  clothes  on  that,  and  forgetting 
censors,  delayed  permits,  prisoners,  and  war,  gave 
myself  up  to  the  delicious  and  unaccustomed  sun, 
and  a  survey  of  the  river.  For  a  mile  or  so,  up 
and  down,  people  were  sunning  themselves  and 
swimming,  all  as  careless  of  clothes  as  so  many 
fish. 

There  were  men  who,  although  the  front  was 

56 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

only  a  few  hours'  motor  ride  away,  seemed  to  have 
no  more  pressing  work  at  that  hour  in  the  morn- 
ing than  to  stand  stretching  themselves  in  the 
sun.  There  were  many  mothers,  with  little  chil- 
dren playing  about  them,  who  had  the  air  of  coming 
here  often  to  spend  the  day.  Each  had  his  little 
spot  on  the  sand  and  paid  no  more  attention  to 
anybody  else  than  natives  do  bathing  in  some 
tropical  river. 

A  picnic-party  of  four  young  people  landed  a 
little  way  down-stream.  They  put  their  lunch- 
boxes  on  the  sand;  the  boys  walked  away  a  bit, 
peeled  off  their  clothes  and  jumped  into  the  river; 
the  girls  went  in  by  themselves.  Just  in  front  of 
me  a  party  landed — a  pretty  girl  in  white,  and  two 
men,  one  of  whom  appeared  to  be  her  brother. 
They  took  up  a  claim  on  the  sand,  the  men  stepped 
aside  and,  like  the  others,  hurried  into  the  water. 
The  girl,  standing  erect  in  the  bright  sunshine, 
slowly  impinned  her  hat,  took  off  slippers  and  stock- 
ings, by  some  deft  and  apparently  absent-minded 
sleight  of  hand,  slipped  a  boy's  bathing-suit  under 
her  skirt,  reached  down  inside  her  waist,  pulled  it 
on,  and  so  slipped  out  of  her  dress,  and  into  it,  as 
neatly  as  you  please.  She  didn't  swim,  but  only 
lay  down  to  sun  herself,  and  the  grace  and  non- 
chalance with  which  she  carried  the  whole  thing 
off  were  delightful  to  see. 

57 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

With  a  novel  aiid  most  refreshing  feeUng  of 
getting  out  of  a  cage,  I  took  a  iiin  down  the  beach 
and  back  again.  There  were  several  old  bumboat 
women,  with  little  stands  where  they  sold  currant- 
cakes  and  lemon-pop,  and  it  was  quaint  to  stalk 
up  to  these  stands  and  bai'gain  over  a  few  kopecks' 
worth  of  cookies  with  these  thrifty  old  women,  who 
thought  only  of  the  kopecks  and  paid  no  more  at- 
tention to  their  somewhat  exotic-looking  customers 
than  to  the  paper  on  the  wall.  Once,  out  of  some 
tufts  of  beach-grass,  projected  a  pair  of  able-bodied 
legs  on  which  a  tiny  girl  was  splashing  sand.  As 
I  jogged  by,  the  owner  sat  up  and  revealed,  not  the 
little  girl's  father,  but  a  handsome  woman  of  thirty- 
five  or  so.  She  said  something  to  her  daughter, 
smiled,  and,  reaching  casually  behind  her,  threw 
across  her  shoulders  one  of  those  fringed  wliite 
Russian  shawls,  splashed  with  roses.  When  I  came 
back  a  few  minutes  later,  mother  and  daughter 
were  just  starting  for  the  water.  Clad  as  Lady 
Godiva,  except  for  the  shawl,  mother  and  child 
strolled  mto  the  water,  then  the  little  girl  took  the 
shawl  back  to  shore,  as  the  other  had  done,  and 
they  swam  together. 

It  was  pleasant  to  sit  there  in  the  August  sun- 
shine by  the  warm  Dnieper  River  and  be  sun- 
burned equally  all  over,  and  to  find  how  quickly, 
when  clothes  are  thrown  away  altogether,  people 

58 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

seem  just  as  much  dressed  as  other  animals.  But 
a  one  o'clock  train  for  the  prison-camp  snatched 
me  away  from  this  Arcadia,  and  before  I  could 
return  again  a  telegram  had  come  from  Petrograd, 
calling  me  back  for  our  long-postponed  trip  to  the 
front. 


59 


Ill 

AT  THE  FRONT 

The  train  left  Petrograd  in  the  afternoon  and  rolled 
lazily  southward  through  the  pleasant,  broken, 
Russian  country — ^pines  and  wistful  white  birches 
that  somehow  made  one  think  of  half-remembered, 
melancholy  bits  of  Russian  novels;  fields  in  strips, 
yellow,  green,  and  white  with  buckwheat,  and 
always,  somewhere  near,  a  white  church  with  its 
cluster  of  gilded  or  indigo  or  sky-blue  domes,  like 
little  upturned  balloons. 

There  is  nothing  tight  or  neat  or  finished  about 
this  Russian  landscape.  It  is  as  wide  and  loose  and 
easy-going  as  Russian  nature  itself.  Sometimes 
there  are  fences,  more  often  not — they  seem  to 
get  along  just  as  well  without  fences.  People  have 
been  living  here  for  a  thousand  years,  and  yet  much 
of  it  looks  like  new  country.  Behind  this  there  are 
disorderliness  and  indolence,  to  be  sure,  but  it  is 
not  quite  so  simple  as  that.  There  is  a  different 
w^ay  of  thmkhig  altogether,  the  way  of  faith  rather 
than  works,  and  a  people  less  certain  than  most 
thrifty  westerners  are  of  the  importance  of  ma- 
terial things,  governed  more  by  their  impulses  than 
by  what  we  call  common  sense. 

60 


AT    THE    FRONT 

No  prodigy  of  faith  or  repentance  too  wild  to 
spring  from  this  unexciting  plain.  Here  you  may 
still  meet  pilgrims,  with  matted  hair  and  the  faith 
— and  dirt — of  the  early  Christian  martyrs;  down 
just  such  country  roads  the  whole  countryside  goes 
marching  and  singing,  with  ikons  and  incense  and 
pictures  of  saints.  And  it  seems  quite  as  natural 
to  a  Russian  peasant  to  throw  himself  on  his  knees 
and  kiss  the  earth  he  has  defiled  with  his  sins  as 
to  drive  fence  stakes  into  it. 

The  long  train  was  packed  like  all  overnight 
trains  out  of  Petrograd,  and  to  work  up  through  it 
to  the  dining-car  was,  in  a  sort  of  way,  to  walk 
through  Russia  itself.  There  was  a  car  of  the  Com- 
pagnie  Internationale  des  Wagons  Lits,  a  remnant 
of  peaceful  Europe  and  a  trifle  more  expensive  than 
the  "government"  sleepers,  and  here,  in  compara- 
tive seclusion,  a  grumpy  old  general  in  a  pale-blue 
overcoat  with  vermilion  facings,  blazing  with  or- 
ders, and  a  distinguished-appearing  lady,  who  looked 
as  if  she  might  be  bound  for  a  hospital  near  the 
front  of  which  she  was  head  sister  or  patroness. 

Then  a  regular  sleeper,  crowded  with  officers 
going  down  to  their  regiments;  then  two  or  three 
bare  third-class  coaches,  windows  closed  and  jammed 
with  soldiers  singing,  playing  accordions,  and  won- 
dering who  the  devil  you  might  be  as  you  waded 
through  boots  and  teakettles,  and  that  hot,  close 

61 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

soldier  smell  of  sweaty  wool,  tobacco,  and  boot 
leather.  Then  a  civilian  sleeper  packed  with  people 
for  the  provinces — students  in  embroidered  blouses, 
a  vigorous  old  dowager  clattering  away  at  the  top 
of  her  lungs,  a  fat  little  chinovnik  (prosecuting  at- 
torney, very  likely,  in  some  distant  "government") 
snoozing  in  the  comer  of  his  coupe,  curtain  drawn; 
and,  leaning  out  of  the  open  window  in  the  passage- 
way, a  woman,  wrapped  Spanish-dancer  fashion 
in  a  white-fringed  shawl  splashed  with  big  pink 
roses,  smoking  and  watching  the  view.  And  from 
the  open  coupe  doors,  as  one  edged  past,  came 
glimpses  of  people  making  tea,  strings  of  those 
throaty  diphthongs  so  hard  for  a  foreigner  to  pro- 
nounce, and  the  odor  of  strong  perfume  and  ciga- 
rettes. 

Merely  to  get  a  place  on  one  of  these  overnight 
war-time  trains  out  of  Petrograd,  even  those  running 
away  from  the  front,  is  something  of  a  feat,  and 
requires  a  military  pass,  or  a  letter  from  one's  em- 
bassy, or  at  the  least  the  help  of  one  of  those  devi- 
ous old  commissionaires  who  hang  about  hotel  en- 
trances and,  for  a  few  rubles,  somehow  succeed 
in  opening  doors  against  which  the  stranger  bumps 
his  head  in  vain.  A  line  half  a  block  long  is  always 
waiting  outside  the  up-town  ticket-office,  and  when 
you  finally  get  to  the  window  there  is  nothing  vacant 
for  the  next  two  weeks.    But,  you  explain,  you  must 

62 


AT    THE    FRONT 

be  in  Moscow  to-morrow  .  .  .  the  ticket-seller 
merely  lifts  his  shoulders  and  turns  to  the  next 
man. 

Why,  in  this  untroubled  interior,  should  this 
be?  Why  not  run  more  trains  or  run  them  faster? 
But  why,  for  the  matter  of  that,  did  it  take  you 
twenty  minutes  to  buy  an  ordinary  ticket  to  one 
of  the  Petrograd  suburbs,  and  why  does  the  ticket- 
seller  close  his  window  half  a  minute  before  the 
train  leaves,  to  go  wandering  off  somewhere  in 
search  of  change?  Why  does  a  man  sweeping  out 
a  restaurant  laboriously  sweep  a  peck  of  broken 
bottles  the  length  of  the  room  instead  of  first  pick- 
ing up  the  glass  and  carr^dng  it  out  and  then  sweep- 
ing the  dust  ? 

Russia  is  full  of  such  dark  mysteries,  impossible 
to  solve.  One  of  the  first  things  you  learn  after 
crossing  the  frontier  and  having  the  letter  of  recom- 
mendation from  the  State  Department  to  your 
own  ambassador,  which  you  proudly  exhibit,  seized, 
while  your  overcoat  pocket  bulging  with  papers 
goes  through  untouched,  is  not  to  demand  logical 
explanations.  Take  things  as  they  come,  in  this 
vast  and  fascinating  country,  but  don't  ask  why. 

The  restaurant-car,  still  carrying  its  advertise- 
ments of  hotels  in  Brussels,  Ostend,  and  the  Riviera, 
was  crowded  with  officers  in  high,  tight  boots,  snug 
breeches,  and  tan-covered  Russian  blouses  belted 

63 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

in  at  the  waist.  Most  of  these  young  men  are  not 
in  the  least  "Russian"  as  the  word  is  often  under- 
stood at  home — neither  black  and  bristling,  nor 
with  broad  cheek-bones  and  close-set;  slanting  eyes. 
They  are  more  likely  to  be  tallish,  blond  young  men 
with  blue  eyes  and  close-cropped  tan  mustaches, 
who  would  pass  in  a  crowd  for  Americans  or  Danes 
— or  even  Austrians,  for  the  matter  of  that.  They 
look  well  in  their  soft  boots  and  blouses,  and,  while 
stiff  and  soldierlike  when  necessary,  generally  have 
a  rather  easy-going,  boyish  air,  which  the  comfort- 
able lines  of  their  uniforms  help  to  carry  out.  Most 
of  them  speak  French,  and  the  few  who  know  Eng- 
lish are  generally  rather  pleased  to  practise  it. 

One  on  our  train  had  been  to  New  York,  where 
he  spent  most  of  the  morning,  he  said,  watching 
people  boiling  in  and  out  of  the  hotel  lobby.  "You 
Americans  seem  to  have  something  inside  you, 
driving  you.  ..."  He  had  had  a  great  time  in 
New  York,  and  found  people  extremely  hospitable, 
although  it  did  not  strike  him  that  they  had  any 
homes.  In  London,  he  said,  if  a  man  asked  you 
to  his  house  you  had  a  feeling  that  he  belonged 
there  and  liked  to  stay  there,  but  his  New  York 
acquaintances  seemed  to  regard  theirs  as  places 
to  sleep  in  or  to  stop  in  for  a  little  until  they  could 
go  somewhere  else. 

Another,  a  nervous,  clever-looking  youth,  son  of 

64 


AT    THE    FRONT 

a  distinguished  general,  gave  the  following  explana- 
tion of  the  vast  number  of  Austrian  prisoners  cap- 
tured in  Brusiloff's  offensive: 

"Well,  you  see,"  he  said,  "my  ancestors  had  a 
certain  sort  of  culture,  but  they  didn't  take  many 
baths.  The  Austrians  have  been  taking  baths  for 
a  long  time,  and  when  they  have  been  in  the  field 
awhile  and  can't  get  a  bath  or  a  shave,  and  be  com- 
fortable, they  become  frightfully  sad.  They  can't 
stand  it,  you  know.  Why,  in  our  first  advance  on 
Lemberg  in  1914,  when  the  whole  army  was  march- 
ing twenty-five  miles  a  day,  and  we  slept  on  the 
ground  with  the  men,  I  had — well,  you  know,  I 
had  animals  on  me.  You  would  have  to  make  up 
an  army  of — of  African  negroes  to  put  up  with  what 
the  Russian  army  stood  during  that  march!" 

I  asked  him  about  the  Germans — ^hadn't  they 
been  taking  baths  for  some  time,  too?  He  shook 
his  head.  "No,  they're  wilder  than  the  Austrians," 
he  said. 

At  Orsha  next  morning  we  left  the  main  line  and 
turned  west  toward  Minsk  and  the  Polish  front. 
Minsk  is  at  the  jumping-off  place  between  Russia 
of  the  Russians  and  Russia  of  the  Poles  and  Jews. 
Riga  is  some  two  hundred  miles  northwestward; 
Lemberg,  round  which  the  armies  of  Brusiloff  seemed 
then  to  be  closing,  a  similar  distance  to  the  south- 
west, and  westward  through  Baranovichi,  Brest- 

65 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

Litovsk,  Ivangorod,  and  Warsaw,  Russian  Poland 
itself. 

We  passed  troop-trains  with  soldiers  singing — 
those  mighty  choruses  which  the  Russian  soldier 
learns  as  part  of  his  training  and  which  he  takes 
to  naturally  after  the  sonorous  prayers  he  has  al- 
ways chanted  in  church — hospital  trains  bound  for 
the  interior,  and  presently  were  hurtling  dizzily 
through  the  crowded,  cobblestoned  streets  of  Minsk 
behind  a  wild  young  soldier-chauffeur  with  a  flat 
tan  cap  slapped  over  one  ear. 

Minsk  is  within  the  Pale,  half  the  population 
are  Jews,  and  amid  the  salt  fish  and  pickles,  dirt, 
old  shoes,  old  clothes,  and  hungry  bargaining  of 
the  poorer  quarters  it  is  only  a  step  to  our  own 
Allen  and  Rivington  Streets.  Army  motor-trucks 
and  strings  of  the  little,  cradle-like  farm-wagons, 
used  in  this  part  of  the  world,  fought  for  way  near 
the  station,  and  the  shopping  streets  seemed  com- 
posed, in  about  equal  parts,  of  mo\dng-picture 
shows,  photographers'  windows  full  of  officers'  pic- 
tures, and  the  officers  themselves. 

There  was  one  of  those  pleasant,  shady  parks 
you  find  in  every  Russian  provincial  town,  where 
people  walk  in  the  afternoon,  and  in  the  evening 
the  world  repaired  to  a  restaurant-garden  known 
as  the  "Track"  where  one  took  dinner  or  tea  while 
the  youth  and  beauty  of  Minsk  promenaded  on  a 

66 


Russian  reserves  just  behind  the  front  dancing  for  a  prize. 
The  competitors  stand  in  Hne  at  the  left. 


In  the  Pale — Jews  of  Minsk  waiting  their  turn  to  buy  sugar. 


AT    THE    FRONT 

walk  just  below  the  tables  or  rode  round  a  little 
bowl-shaped  track  on  their  bicycles.  They  were 
expert  at  this  quaint  amusement,  and  some  sat 
bolt  upright  with  arms  folded,  and  so  went  round 
and  round  the  whole  evening,  in  a  sort  of  delighted 
trance. 

It  was  here,  with  the  arc-lamps  shining  on  the 
dark  park  trees,  and  those  curious,  silent  bicycles 
swimming  past  us  like  figures  on  a  merry-go-round, 
that  a  Russian  officer  began  to  talk  to  us  about 
war  and  things  in  general.  He  was  a  short,  rotund 
little  man  of  middle  age,  a  professor  of  Romance 
languages,  who  had  gone  out  to  serve  in  the 
cavalry. 

"There  are  only  two  really  beautiful  things  in 
the  world,"  he  declared  after  telling  how  they  had 
held  a  bridge  until  the  guns  came  up — "love  and 
war.  Even  a  battle-field — ^yes,  when  youVe  seen 
a  battle-field" — and  he  doubled  up  his  short  arms 
in  imitation  of  the  dead  lying  there — "there  is  a 
certain  aesthetic  beauty  even  in  that !" 

Looking  at  him  there,  puffing  a  little  in  his  snug 
uniform,  with  its  collar  pushing  up  into  his  sun- 
burnt neck,  one  could  imagine  how,  after  a  life- 
time spent  in  ill-ventilated  classrooms,  fighting 
with  phrases,  he  had  found  in  fresh  air  and  danger 
and  the  jolly  teamwork  of  war  his  first  glimpse  of 
reality.     There  must  be  a  good  many  such — not 

67 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

professional  soldiers,  whose  point  of  view  is  very 
different — but  I  never  happened  to  run  across  one 
quite  so  intoxicated. 

"  I  wrote  a  play  out  there  while  we  were  on  trench 
duty.  It's  laid  in  Italy  in  the  early  Renaissance. 
Better  than  reading  a  translation  of  some  stupid 
foreign  novel — you  know  those  little  paper  editions 
they  sell  you  in  our  railroad-stations — that  was  all 
we  had.  But  plays,  pictures,  art,  what  is  it  all 
after  this?    Rubbish — shadows  of  shadows. 

"Take  nature" — and  he  swung  his  cigar  toward 
the  black  wall  of  trees  across  the  track — "what  do 
I  care  about  it  in  peace  times?  But  when  I  go 
out  on  a  reconnoissance,  how  I  look  at  every  leaf ! 
I'm  part  of  it.  There's  significance  in  everything, 
every  shadow,  sound,  smell  of  the  wind:  it  all 
means  something — death,  maybe.  Any  second 
may  be  your  last.  And  when  you  once  get  that  idea, 
have  accepted  it,  then  you're  not  afraid.  It's  like 
throwing  off  a  weight.  You're  a  disembodied  spirit. 
Of  course  we  know  now  that  when  Spencer  wrote 
that  war  had  gone  out  of  fashion  and  that  man 
would  devise  substitutes  for  it,  he  was  writing 
foolishness.  We  talk  of  the  Dark  Ages.  Why, 
the  Dark  Ages  was  a  harmless  game  between  Ox- 
ford and  Cambridge  schoolboys  compared  with 
this  war.    And  the  nex-t  one  will  be  worse." 

He  ran  on  as  people  run  on  in  Dostoyevski's 

68 


AT    THE    FRONT 

novels,  as  Russians  really  do  run  on  in  every-day 
life — and  next  day  run  off  in  another  direction, 
perhaps  a  quite  contrary  one.  They  take  ideas  with 
a  curious  intensity,  and  jump  on  a  new  notion 
and  carry  it  to  endless  lengths.  He  wondered 
if  we  had  not  been  on  the  wrong  track  altogether 
with  our  theories  of  peace  and  tranquillity — "Chris- 
tianity, even,  tells  us  not  to  fight,  and  Christianity 
started  more  fighting  than  anything  in  history !' 

"Of  course,  in  England,  it's  the  fashion  to  be 
comfortable.  You've  made  a  god  of  comfort  and 
contentment — a  man  daren't  be  unhappy  in  Eng- 
land. If  he  is,  he  is  queer — and  whatever  you  are 
you  mustn't  be  queer.  You  know" — and  he  turned 
toward  the  Englishman— "and  please  take  this 
lightly,  and  as  I  mean  it,  for  I've  had  pleasant 
times  in  your  country:  I  don't  like  the  English. 
There  is  something  bourgeois — ^you've  made  a  dis- 
tinguished bourgeoisie,  but  it's  the  contented-grocer 
business,  nevertheless.  Can  any  great  mind  be 
'happy'?  Who  of  your  great  men  was  happy? 
Shelley  wasn't,  surely,  nor  Carlyle,  nor  Wordsworth 
— in  his  later  years,  at  any  rate." 

"Shakespeare  was!"  said  the  Englishman,  plump- 
ing out  the  great  answer  to  all  such  arguments  as 
this.  The  Russian  didn't  reply  with  Mr.  Shaw 
that  Shakespeare  didn't  worry  about  his  soul  be- 
cause he  was  only  an  ordinary  Englishman,  plus 

69 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

magnificent  rhetoric.  He  retorted  that  there  was 
nothing  to  prove  it  by  except  his  work. 

"Of  course  Russians  are  just  the  other  way," 
he  said.  "The  Russian  isn't  happy  unless  he's 
miserable.  He's  got  to  be  suffering  for  something 
— for  his  sins  or  for  an  idea — to  think  eveiything 
is  wrong,  and  he  must  make  it  right.  ..." 

He  went  breezing  on  into  various  aspects  of  the 
perilous  life — poets  getting  married,  and  so  on — 
he  knew  all  the  contemporary  Russian  poets,  he 
said,  and  we  were  drifting  down  the  moonlit  street, 
still  talking,  when  he  found  that  it  was  train  time. 
I  had  meant  to  ask  him  where  he  put  hospitals  in 
his  scheme  of  beauty,  and  if  he  had  ever  watched 
the  regular  morning  dressing  of  bad  shell-wounds, 
but  he  had  just  time  to  hail  an  izvoschik  and  tell 
us  to  hunt  him  up  some  time  in  Petrograd. 

We  visited  various  hospitals  in  Minsk — a  big 
evacuation  camp  by  the  railroad-track,  where,  in 
double-walled  tents  almost  as  warm  as  houses,  the 
wounded  were  sorted  before  being  sent  to  more 
permanent  stations  inland;  another,  in  a  school 
building,  under  the  patronage  of  a  grand  duchess, 
was  intended  for  serious  surgical  cases — trepanning, 
smashed  jaws,  splintered  back-bones,  and  so  on. 
The  head  sister  here  explained  things  in  perfect 
English  and  French  as  if  receiving  guests  in  her 
own  drawing-room,  and  the  whole  place  had  the 

70 


AT    THE    FRONT 

air  of  being  run  by  those  who  knew  not  only  their 
present  business  but  another  world  as  well. 

Then  there  was  a  big  barrack  hospital,  similar 
to  such  hospitals  elsewhere,  but  interesting,  as 
many  things  on  this  trip  were,  not  so  much  for  its 
novelty  as  because  it  was  in  Russia,  and  part  of 
that  tremendous  improvement  which,  with  the 
help  of  the  Zemstvo  Union,  the  Union  of  Cities, 
and  other  volunteer  influences,  had  been  made 
in  the  organization  of  sanitaiy  and  commissary 
service  since  the  war  began.  Our  hosts  seemed  to 
feel  this,  too,  and  they  showed  us  disinfecting  ma- 
chines, model  laundries,  and  bacteriological  labora- 
tories, with  the  air  of  saying:  "You  see,  we  too 
have  all  these  things.  ..." 

Our  party  was  one  of  those  personally  conducted 
groups,  familiar  enough  on  most  of  the  other  fronts, 
but  rather  a  novelty  in  Russia.  There  were  three 
EngHsh  correspondents,  two  Frenchmen,  an  Italian, 
two  Hollanders,  and  two  Americans.  Then  there 
was  the  Foreign  Office  secretary,  who  had  charge 
of  correspondents,  two  young  officers  from  the 
headquarters  staff,  not  to  mention  cooks,  chauffeurs, 
two  sleeping-cars,  restaurant-car,  four  automobiles, 
and  the  flat  cars  to  carry  them.  Commandants 
must  have  trembled  as  thej^  saw  us  coming,  but 
they  rose  to  the  occasion  with  characteristic  Rus- 
sian hospitality.     Everything  they  could  do  they 

71 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

did,  and,  more  or  less  continuously  eating,  shak- 
ing hands,  and  drinking  tea,  we  proceeded  down  the 
steps  of  militaiy  hierarchy  from  the  staff  through 
army,  corps,  and  division  commanders  to  the  first 
line  itself. 

With  the  headquarters  staff  we  lunched — one 
of  those  spacious  Russian  repasts  whose  peculiarity 
consists  in  this,  that  you  eat  enough  zakuska — that 
is  to  say,  caviare,  salads,  sardines,  smoked  fish,  bread, 
butter,  and  cheese,  and  other  hors-d'oeuvres — for  an 
ordinaiy  meal;  then  the  meat  boiled  in  the  soup, 
then  the  soup  itself,  and  then  begin  on  a  regular 
dinner,  ending  with  pastry  and  sweets. 

The  commander  of  the  — th  Army  we  encoun- 
tered in  a  rambling  old  farmhouse  to  which  we 
came  in  the  dark,  and  still  farther  on  next  morn- 
ing a  corps  commander  at  the  pleasant  country 
estate  of  some  absentee  Polish  gentleman  a  little 
way  behind  the  line.  He  was  a  general  of  cavalry, 
a  clean-cut,  soldierlike  officer  who  combined  an 
air  of  knowing  his  profession — he  had  written  books 
about  it — with  the  graces  of  a  man  of  the  world. 
After  the  usual  hand-shaking  down  a  long  line  of 
staff-officers,  we  went  out  with  him  on  a  tour  of 
inspection. 

All  the  little  thatched  villages  in  the  neighbor- 
hood had  been  turned  to  military  uses — pigs  driven 
out,  walls  whitewashed,  fresh  pine  doors  put  on, 

72 


AT    THE    FRONT 

and  the  place  made  livable.  In  one  such  cottage 
was  a  paymaster  and  his  clerks  and  a  million  rubles; 
another  was  full  of  packages  from  home;  in  an- 
other soldiers  were  stamping  letters,  twenty-five 
thousand  of  which  went  through  this  army  post- 
office  ever}^  day.  We  poked  through  a  big  hay-barn 
piled  with  stores,  onions  in  strings,  lentils,  potatoes, 
dried  mushrooms,  pepper — "It  takes  lots  of  pepper 
to  get  to  Berlin,"  the  general  punned  in  French — 
fresh  butter  in  tubs  from  Siberia,  jam,  preserves, 
bread  (three  pounds  for  each  man  a  day),  and  tons 
of  sugar.  In  short,  whatever  embarrassments 
people  might  have  in  the  interior — in  Petrograd 
housewives  might  only  buy  ten  pounds  of  sugar  a 
month  and  must  stand  in  line  for  hours  sometimes 
for  that,  and  meat  they  might  buy  but  once  a  week 
— it  was  plain  that  there  was  plenty  of  everything 
at  the  front. 

The  farmyard  hospitals  were  quite  Russian  in 
their  easy-going,  rather  haphazard  comfortable- 
ness. Beds  had  been  put  in  renovated  barns  and 
cow-sheds;  at  one  place  they  had  improvised  a 
Russian  bath,  and  a  dozen  or  so  soldiers  were  bak- 
ing themselves  in  true  banya  style.  Several  of  these 
farm  hospitals  were  only  half  filled,  and  with  their 
sunny  orchards  and  smiling  young  nurses  they  sug- 
gested suffering  less  than  summer  resorts. 

In  one  orchard  we  met  a  lady-doctor,  very  young 

73 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

to  be  a  doctor,  with  pale  skin,  black,  slightly  up- 
slanting  eyes,  and  hair  combed  straight  back  ex- 
cept for  a  little  old-fashioned  bang  that  suggested 
some  picture  of  Manet's.  She  was  writing  letters 
at  a  table  under  a  pear-tree,  and  got  up  only  long 
enough  to  show  us  the  tent  where  she  and  the  nurses 
slept,  and  then  returned  to  her  writing  again.  It 
is  fashionable,  of  course,  to  be  a  nurse  nowadays, 
but  only  the  highly  recommended  or  those  with 
influential  friends  get  these  chances  at  the  front, 
and  most  of  those  we  met  had  an  ease  of  manner 
which  their  homely  surroundings  only  enhanced. 
There  was  always  some  one  who  spoke  English  or 
French  or  both,  and  our  progress  through  these 
farmyard  hospitals  had  all  the  amenity  of  an  agree- 
able house-party. 

One  of  the  always  novel  sights  of  Petrograd  and 
Moscow  these  days  is  that  of  these  volunteer  nurses, 
each  with  her  flock  of  ten  or  a*  dozen  convalescent 
soldiers  shuffling  along  the  Nevsky  or  the  Neva 
wall,  going  to  the  movies  or  staring  wide-eyed  at 
the  pictures  in  the  Tretiakoff  Galleiy  or  the  Her- 
mitage. You  always  wonder  what  they  are  saying, 
these  lumbering  peasant  boys  who  have  never  per- 
haps been  away  from  their  distant  villages,  and 
their  demure  little  chaperons  who  have  not  infre- 
quently lived  the  carefully  guarded  lives  of  young 
ladies  of  society  until  the  war  gave  them  their  red 

74 


AT    THE    FRONT 

cross  and  nunlike  head-dress  and  a  chance  to  wander 
about  town  like  a  sort  of  Harun-al-Rashid. 

Generally  speaking,  these  field-hospitals  seemed 
well  equipped  and  well  managed.  The  only  lack 
that  particularly  struck  me  was  that  of  protection 
against  flies.  To  any  one  used  to  American  screens 
and  our  almost  morbid  terror  of  the  fly,  Russian 
indifference  to  them  is  rather  appalling.  Pos- 
sibly, the  shortness  of  the  Russian  summer  has 
something  to  do  with  it.  In  one  big  tent,  which 
had  only  one  small  opening,  to  which  a  screen  door 
or  a  mosquito-netting  could  easily  have  been  fitted, 
the  flies  swarmed  over  the  men.  Some  fanned 
themselves  with  little  willow  switches,  but  the 
weaker  simply  lay  back  and  let  the  flies  crawl  over 
their  faces.  In  another  place  two  badly  wounded 
men  had  been  put  on  cots  in  the  open  air  without 
any  sort  of  netting.  A  nurse  waved  a  switch  toward 
them  now  and  then,  but  the  flies  swarmed  over 
the  bed  and  on  the  men's  faces,  nevertheless. 

As  soon  as  our  general  hove  in  sight  you  must 
imagine  soldiers  jumping  to  attention  at  the  warn- 
ing cr>'  of  '^Smema!^'  and  splitting  the  quiet  air 
with  the  greeting  always  given  to  officers  of  su- 
perior rank.  The  phrase  means  "A  health  to  your 
Excellency!" — Zdravia  jelaiem  vashe  prevoskhoditel- 
stvo! — but  the  devoted  peasant  soldiers,  straining 
every  muscle  to  stand  as  stiffly  and  shout  as  loudly 

75 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

and  quickly  as  they  can,  roar  it  in  a  sort  of  pro- 
longed bark,  beginning  with  "Zdra^'  and  ending 
with  ''stvo!'' 

The  general  always  smiled  and  acknowledged 
the  greeting  with  a  word  and  wave  of  the  hand. 
He  chatted  and  laughed  with  the  men  and  nurses 
in  the  wards,  and  the  whole  morning  left  an  im- 
pression of  great  good  nature  and  of  fatherly  re- 
lations between  officers  and  men — an  impression 
similar  to  that  one  receives  in  so  many  different 
forms  in  this  paradoxical  empire,  whose  govern- 
ment has  been  so  stiff  and  whose  people  so  easy- 
going, and  in  their  relations  to  each  other  one  of  the 
most  democratic  in  the  world. 

We  lunched  at  the  country-house  headquarters 
that  noon  at  a  table  set  under  the  trees,  with  the 
regimental  band  in  a  circle  tooting  on  the  lawn. 
And  after  more  of  the  beguiling  zakuska,  mcluding 
delicious  stewed  mushrooms,  and  a  long  and  genial 
dinner  with  claret  and  toasts  and  an  enemy  flyer 
over  the  distant  tree-tops,  we  went  to  see  the 
Russian  aeroplanes. 

As  we  did  so  I  was  reminded  again,  as  an  Amer- 
ican not  infrequently  is  in  Europe,  of  the  compara- 
tively decorative  quality  life  often  assumes  where 
feudal  traditions  still  survive.  The  owner  of  this 
country-place  probably  had  some  sort  of  title. 
Looking  at  the  solid  old  house  with  its  conserva- 

76 


AT   THE    FRONT 

tory,  strolling  through  the  formal  allees  of  the  little 
park,  one  could  imagine  other  places  like  this  in 
the  neighborhood  and  a  pleasant  and  even  rather 
courtly  coming  and  going  between  them,  and  it 
was  a  trifle  startling,  on  steppmg  through  the  wil- 
lows that  screened  the  house,  to  find  behind  it,  and 
doubtless  its  material  support,  a  distillery. 

The  flyers  went  hunying  up  from  the  meadow 
as  soon  as  we  arrived.  There  were  four  of  them, 
and  one  of  the  young  birdmen  did  a  beautiful  series 
of  spirals,  shifting  from  a  left  to  a  right  hand  turn, 
and  then  volplaning  down  and  shooting  up  again. 
One  of  our  party  went  for  a  ride  so  far  that  every- 
body forgot  about  liim,  and  when  the  little  speck 
did  appear,  the  zealous  gunners  of  a  near-by  battery 
promptly  sent  a  couple  of  shrapnel-shells  out  to 
meet  him.  At  least  so  the  passenger  said,  and  next 
day  while  recounting  his  experience  to  another 
airman  on  another  part  of  the  front,  the  latter  re- 
sponded breezily:  "You  were  very  lucky — generally, 
when  we  fire  at  our  own  planes,  we  bring  'em 
down!" 

Back  for  tea — for  nothing  goes  very  far  in  Rus- 
sia without  tea — and  after  changing  stations  over- 
night, off  in  the  motors  at  six  nex-t  morning  toward 
the  first  line  itself.  Behind  a  pine  forest,  screening 
us  from  the  German  observation  balloons,  horses 
were  waiting,  and  here,  too,  was  the  division  com- 

77 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

mander  wrapped  in  his  brown  felt-like  Russian 
overcoat;  a  genial,  slightly  whimsical-looking  man 
with  spectacles,  pointed  black  beard,  and  mustaches, 
more  "Russian"  than  our  general  of  the  day  be- 
fore. 

It  is  not  easy  to  make  clear  just  what  one  means 
by  this — partly  it  lay  in  Uttle  differences  of  appear- 
ance and  intonation,  but  also  in  a  certain  expansive- 
ness  and,  so  to  say,  disregard  of  the  main  chance 
— a  man  who  might,  as  it  were,  stop  to  talk  about 
religion  although  he  did  miss  the  train.  Western 
Europeans  are,  somehow,  more  cut-and-dried,  more 
keen  on  "accomphshing"  something. 

He  received  us  like  old  friends,  and  at  once,  with 
eloquent  gestures  and  expressive  use  of  eyebrows, 
went  off  into  a  monologue,  a  sort  of  semiserious 
oration  about  what  we  were  going  to  see — how  we 
mustn't  do  this,  hut  we  should  do  that,  and  he 
couldn't  fire  such  and  such  a  battery,  because  the 
enemy  might  reply  and  hit  us,  hut  and  so  on — all 
with  such  kindliness  and  hearty  enthusiasm  as  if 
he  felt  we  were  the  most  important  things  in  the 
world — as  very  likely,  at  the  moment,  he  did.  One 
of  the  English  correspondents  commented  on  the 
difference  between  his  manner  and  the  monosyllabic, 
almost  diffident  way  in  which  a  British  division 
commander  would  have  done  the  same  thing. 

Divided  into  groups  of  three  or  four,  we  mounted 

78 


AT   THE    FRONT 

stocky  little  Siberian  horses,  very  like  our  own 
bronchos,  and  rode  for  four  or  five  kilometres  through 
the  fresh-smelling  pines  to  open,  hilly  country  and 
the  trenches.  Once  we  had  to  gallop  over  an  open 
place  already  pockmarked  with  shells  and  in  sight 
of  a  German  observation  balloon;  there  had  been 
a  brisk  skirmish  the  night  before,  and  one  of  the 
farm  hospitals  we  visited  later  that  morning  was 
full  of  wounded,  but  the  trenches  as  we  came  into 
them  were  quiet  as  a  park.  Over  by  the  village 
of  Krevo  to  the  right,  where  the  lines  met,  we  could 
see  the  smoke  of  enemy  camp-fires,  but  even  after 
ten  or  a  dozen  shells  from  our  amiable  division  com- 
mander's big  guns  had  wailed  over  our  heads  to 
throw  up  clouds  of  earth  and  smoke  in  the  German 
entanglements  two  or  three  hundred  yards  in  front 
of  us,  they  were  too  bored  to  reply. 

We  returned  past  camps  of  reserves,  a  cemetery 
where  a  Russian  priest  was  burying  a  soldier  killed 
the  night  before,  to  the  bomb-proof  and  snug  httle 
arbor  dining-room  of  the  regimental  colonel,  a 
charming  old  gentleman,  with  a  white  beard  and 
the  manner  of  a  shy  and  dreamy  Santa  Claus.  He 
showed  us  his  bomb-proof,  with  a  guitar  on  the  wall 
and  geraniums  in  the  window,  gave  each  of  us  a 
big  porringer  spoon,  shaped  like  the  wooden  spoon 
the  Russian  soldier  sticks  in  his  boot,  and  made 
by  some  of  the  men  out  of  aluminum  from  German 

79 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

shells.  Then  orderlies  brought  in  a  steaming  samo- 
var, and  we  had  tea  and  biscuits  and  cheese,  and 
so  back  to  the  motors  again. 

We  drove  into  sunny  farming  country,  where 
peasant  women  were  working  in  the  wheat,  visited 
more  farmhouse  hospitals,  and  finally  turned  into 
a  big  meadow  with  a  decorated  pavilion  on  high 
ground  at  the  farther  end.  It  was  the  tsarevitch's 
birthday,  the  honor  men  of  a  regiment  just  back 
from  the  trenches  for  reserve  duty  were  to  be  deco- 
rated, several  young  officers  were  off  for  France, 
and  the  whole  was  made  the  occasion  of  a  big  regi- 
mental family  party. 

Our  corps  commander  of  the  day  before  had 
motored  over  to  distribute  the  decorations,  several 
of  the  volunteer  nurses  had  been  invited,  too,  and 
after  the  usual  elaborate  hand-shaking,  we  all  sat 
down  in  the  pavilion  for  lunch.  It  was  hard  to 
realize  that  war  was  only  a  few  kilometres  away — 
on  a  similar  fete  day,  on  the  Austrian  side,  the  Rus- 
sians first  broke  through  in  their  big  offensive. 

In  the  midst  of  the  luncheon  there  was  a  bugle- 
call,  and  several  of  the  young  fellows  who  had  been 
eating  and  laughing  with  us  jumped  up  and  began 
to  say  good-by.  But  evidently  it  was  no  ordinary 
good-by.  Each  came  up  to  the  priest,  who  blessed 
and  kissed  them,  and  then  they  and  their  comrades 
embraced,  throwing  their  arms  about  each  other, 

80 


AT    THE    FRONT 

and  kissing,  Russian  fashion,  with  tremendous 
fervor  on  the  mouth.  These  were  the  men  going 
to  France.  A  company  waited  a  little  distance 
away,  and  this  was  to  join  companies  from  other 
regiments.  They  seemed  very  few  and  France  a 
long  way  off,  and  one  couldn't  help  wondering  if 
many  of  these  lads  would  come  back,  but  this 
aspect  of  the  adventure  did  not  disturb  them,  and 
in  great  spirits  they  galloped  off  down  the  meadow. 

There  were  toasts  and  hot  cinnamon  punch,  and 
then  began  the  distribution  of  medals.  The  regi- 
ment, or  at  least  that  part  of  it  which  had  just  come 
from  fighting,  was  drawn  up  in  half  a  hollow  square 
with  those  to  be  decorated  on  one  side.  The  corps 
commander  stood  behind  a  little  table,  and  the 
men  came  up  single  file,  just  as  they  had  marched 
from  the  trenches,  with  all  their  fighting  kit — car- 
tridge-boxes half  empty,  hand-grenades  at  their 
sides,  every  man  with  his  gas-mask  in  a  tin  tube 
dangling  from  his  belt. 

The  Foreign  Office  man  could  tell  where  each 
one  came  from  as  soon  as  he  spoke.  "There's  a 
Little  Russian — that's  a  boy  from  Petrograd — this 
one's  from  Mongolia — here's  one  from  the  North 
— my  country.  .  .  ."  They  seemed  to  have  come 
from  every  comer  of  the  empire. 

As  each  approached  he  saluted,  looked  the  gen- 
eral square  in  the  eyes,  and  barked  out  his  greeting 

81 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

at  the  top  of  his  lungs.  The  general  thanked  him 
for  his  good  work  and  pinned  the  medal  on  his 
chest.  Then  the  soldier  barked  out  the  phrase 
which  means  that  he  was  glad  to  suffer  for  his  coun- 
try— "Radi  staratsa  vashe  prevoskhoditelstvo  !"  which 
came  out  rat-tat-tat — like  the  beat  of  a  snare-drum. 
Some  got  mixed,  one  or  two  were  so  stage-struck 
they  could  scarce  speak  at  all,  but  most  of  them 
nearly  blew  the  general's  hat  off. 

The  general  smiled,  patted  them  on  the  arm, 
asked  some  what  they  had  done  to  deserve  their 
medals,  and  appeared  like  a  proud  and  slightly 
amused  parent  with  his  hurly-burly  children.  When 
the  last  man  had  stumped  away  with  the  stiff-legged 
parade  step,  the  general  stepped  foi'wai'd,  addressed 
the  regiment,  and  called  for  cheers.  The  Russian 
soldiers'  cheer  is  not  like  our  three  hurrahs,  but  a 
sort  of  "round,"  like  their  songs,  with  everybody 
roaring  as  long  as  he  has  breath,  a  continuous  "ray- 
ray-ray-ray ! "  like  the  cheering  at  our  political 
conventions.  There  were  cheers  for  the  tsarevitch, 
for  the  regiment,  and  I  don't  know  what  else,  and 
then  with  the  men's  voices  roaring  all  over  the 
meadow  the  regimental  band  swept  in  with  the 
Russian  hymn — " Bozhe  Tsarya  khrani"  ("God 
Save  the  Tsar"). 

Then  the  sports  began.  They  danced  and  sang 
and  climbed  a  pole  and  there  was  one  particularly 

82 


Decorated — "The  General  appeared  like  a  proud  and  slightly  anuLsed  parent 

with  his  hurlv-burly  children." 


Young  Russian  officers  sa\nng  good-by  as  they  were  about  to  leave  for  the 

French  front. 


AT    THE    FRONT 

popular  game  played  by  two  blindfolded  men 
tethered  to  a  stake  with  ten  or  fifteen  feet  of  rope. 
One  had  a  whistle,  the  other  a  sort  of  stuffed  club, 
and  it  was  the  latter's  business  to  catch  the  first, 
whack  him  as  hard  as  he  could,  and  then  throw  the 
club  away.  Then  both  crawled  round  until  one 
or  another  found  it  and  the  chase  began  again. 
Pair  after  pair  of  these  big  tan-colored  children 
jo^'fully  blindfolded  themselves  and  bumped  and 
butted  into  each  other,  every  now  and  then  rolling 
over,  their  clumsy  boots  in  air,  like  bears  at  play. 

The  sports  were  still  going  on  when  the  corps 
commander  and  guests  were  asked  to  inspect  the 
regiment's  new  camp  in  the  pines  at  the  foot  of  the 
meadow.  Although  here  but  four  days,  they  had 
neat  little  sanded  paths  marked  by  pine  branches 
and  flowers  stuck  in  the  ground,  beds  of  pine  boughs 
spread  on  logs,  and  everything  snug  as  a  ship.  We 
tasted  the  soup,  and  one  of  the  soldiers  was  called 
out  to  show  his  underclothing.  It  was  interesting 
to  find  that  it  had  the  stamp  of  the  Zemstvo  Union 
and  also  to  watch  one  of  the  officers  stand  during 
the  whole  episode  with  his  hand  on  the  somewhat 
embarrassed  soldier's  shoulder,  smiling  and  eveiy 
now  and  then  patting  his  stout,  tanned  neck. 

It  had  been  growing  dark,  and  as  we  came  out 
into  the  open  again  a  bugle  began  to  call  back  and 
forth  through  the  dusk.     Men  hurried  to  their 

83 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

tents  to  form  at  attention,  and  I  supposed  they 
were  showing  how  quickly  they  could  answer  an 
alann  signal,  but  when  they  were  all  at  their  sta- 
tions and  you  could  see  the  rows  standing  stiff  and 
still,  far  back  through  the  trees,  they  suddenly 
broke  into  the  deep  bass  chanting  of  the  evening 
prayer.  The  Russian's  religion  is  always  very 
near.  The  old  izvoschik  jogging  round  the  corner 
in  his  cab,  the  woman  opposite  you  in  the  crowded 
trolley  with  a  lap  full  of  bundles,  cross  themselves 
at  the  sight  of  some  distant  church;  the  soldier, 
munching  his  black  bread  on  the  station  platform, 
crosses  himself  before  he  picks  up  his  rifle  and  gallops 
after  his  train — the  unseen  and  mysterious  is  always 
hovering  just  beneath  the  surfaces  of  every-day. 

The  prayer  went  rising  and  falling  through  the 
pines  in  one  of  those  sweet,  half-melancholy  chants 
which  Russians  learn  as  soon  as  they  know  any- 
thing. There  is  no  artificial  music  in  the  Russian 
church  and  the  diapason  of  the  priest  and  the  voices 
of  choir  and  congregation  take  the  place  of  our 
organ.  I  have  heard  two  sleepy-looking  men  and 
a  couple  of  wispy  girls  in  one  of  the  Kremlin  churches 
chant  with  such  a  carrying  rhythm  that  you  would 
be  sure,  listening  from  the  other  side  of  the  church, 
that  some  sort  of  instmment  was  accompanying 
them.  Spread  out  in  the  twilight,  the  men  could 
not  sing  together  perfectly,  but  these  very  broken 

84 


AT   THE   FRONT 

waves  of  song,  rising  and  falling  through  the  forest, 
had  their  own  impressiveness.  Every  now  and  then, 
along  the  lines,  a  soldier  would  bow  low  as  people 
do  in  the  Russian  church  whenever  the  feeling 
strikes  them,  crossing  himself  with  a  wide  swing- 
ing motion  as  he  bowed. 

"Save  Thy  people  and  bless  all  Thou  hast  given  them.  .  .  ." 
"Give  our  Tsar  Nicholas  victory  over  our  enemies  and  pre^ 
serve  him  under  the  sign  of  Thy  cross.  .  ,  ." 

The  chant  ended,  and  then — for  this  was  a  special 
evening — the  band  crashed  in  again,  and  the  mount- 
ing chords  of  the  Russian  hymn  soared  up  through 
the  pines. 

II 

During  the  night  our  train  ran  up  to  the  north 
of  Molodetchno,  and  next  morning  we  had  a  glimpse 
of  the  curious  amphibious  warfare  which  had  been 
going  on  here  for  a  year  in  this  country  of  lakes 
and  marshes. 

At  Lake  Narotch,  to  which  we  drove  along  a 
corduroy  road,  the  lines  were  intrenched  on  the 
opposite  shores;  in  the  winter  there  had  been  fight- 
ing on  the  ice,  motor-boats  were  used  occasionally 
now,  and  barbed-wire  entanglements  and  even 
trenches  had  been  built  in  the  water.  It  was  into 
this  neighborhood  that  the  German  cavalry  pushed 
after  the  fall  of  Brest-Litovsk  in  a  daring  attempt  to 

85 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

cut  the  Russian  communications,  which  failed,  so 
the  officer  with  us  said,  only  by  a  day.  As  it  was, 
the  Germans  were  turned  back  and  half  of  them 
destroyed — "a  very  interesting  operation,"  he  said. 
He  was  a  big,  handsome,  thoughtful-looking  young 
fellow  with  hair  growing  low  above  wide-apart, 
preoccupied  eyes.  He  spoke  several  languages  and 
examined  prisoners.  I  asked  him  how  far  he  had 
got  in  the  first  big  advance  in  1914.  "All  the  way 
to  Cracow,"  he  said. 

We  looked  at  the  German  lines  through  peri- 
scopes near  the  shore  of  the  lake,  saw  a  few  shrap- 
nel-shells burst  above  them,  then  went  back  to  see 
a  Russian  crew  send  up  their  observation  balloon. 
This  curious  monster,  held  down  by  ropes  and  sand- 
bags, was  swimming  there  in  the  trees,  just  below 
their  tops,  exactly  like  a  big  pike  loafing  in  the 
lily-pads.  They  towed  him  out  into  the  open,  where 
the  cable  was  attached  to  a  drum  on  a  motor 
— made  in  America,  by  the  way — the  sand-bags 
cast  off,  then  the  crew  barked  their  ^'Zdrava 
djelaiem ! "  and  up  he  went.  The  captain  tooted 
on  a  little  horn  when  the  balloon  was  high  enough, 
and  after  what  seemed  like  a  long  wait  a  faint,  an- 
swering toot  came  back.  We  tried  the  telephone 
down  which  the  observer  gives  his  corrections  of 
artillery  fire,  and  the  big  sausage  was  hauled  down 
and  sent  up  again  several  times  with  great  expedition. 

86 


AT   THE    FRONT 

Another  regiment,  whose  history  went  back  to 
1805,  and  which  had  also  just  come  from  the  trenches, 
had  a  field-day  that  afternoon  and  did  for  us  in  fun 
what  they  had  just  been  doing  in  earnest — fired 
trench  bombs,  went  through  skirmish-drill  with 
mounted  infantry,  and  had  some  particularly  in- 
teresting practice  with  mitrailleuse  fire.  A  pine 
board,  one  side  of  which  had  been  cut  into  a  series 
of  teeth  about  six  inches  apart,  was  set  up  length- 
wise on  the  ground  about  fifty  yards  away,  a  ma- 
chine-gun turned  on  it,  and  all  these  teeth  mowed 
ofif  just  as  a  New  York  street-cleaner  washes  snow 
down  the  asphalt  with  a  fire-hose.  While  examin- 
ing the  targets,  I  noticed  that  the  steel  casing  of 
some  of  the  bullets  had  spht  and  twisted  into  the 
same  shapes  generally  pointed  out  to  civilians  as 
the  result  of  explosive  bullets.  Nothing  is  needed 
generally  to  make  the  modem  high-speed  bullet 
look  as  if  it  had  been  blown  apart  except  its  own 
speed  and  a  bone. 

Then,  to  the  music  of  two  concertinas,  they 
danced  while  we  voted  on  the  winner.  Some,  with 
the  squatting  and  kicking  out  of  one  boot  after 
another,  were  like  the  slap-dash  Russian  dancing 
one  occasionally  sees  at  home;  one  man  turned 
handsprings,  fell  flat,  and  flopped  full  length  on  his 
stomach  Hke  a  crocodile,  all  in  time;  and  one  or 
two,  with  their  Mongol  faces,  vague  smiles,  slightly 

87 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

slanting  eyes  haK  closed,  and  the  strange,  soft  in- 
directions of  their  twists  and  turns,  came  out  of 
Asia  somewhere,  though  one  knew  not  where. 

There  was  tea,  and  when  we  reached  the  auto- 
mobiles the  whole  regiment  seemed  to  have  gathered 
there.  The  band  was  there,  too,  and  in  honor  of 
their  allies  struck  up  "God  Save  the  King."  Of- 
ficers and  guests  came  to  salute  and  so  stood  dming 
the  English  anthem,  the  "Marseillaise,"  the  regi- 
mental song,  and  the  Russian  hymn,  whereupon 
the  whole  multitude  broke  into  the  sustained  "ra- 
ra-ra-ing"  of  the  Russian  cheer.  To  this  roar  and 
under  hundreds  of  curious  eyes  we  went  through 
the  usual  hand-shaking,  returned  to  the  automobiles, 
and  scattering  salutes  from  side  to  side,  whii'led 
down  through  the  regiment. 

The  next  day  we  were  to  spend  with  some  Kuban 
Cossacks,  and  during  the  night  ran  back  to  Minsk 
and  thence  southward  on  the  Brest-Litovsk  line 
almost  to  Baranovichi.  The  Germans  held  Bar- 
anovichi, and  shrapnel  puffs  were  cracking  all  about 
a  German  aeroplane  as  the  motors  left  the  station. 

They  toiled  through  the  mud,  past  a  camp  of 
reserves,  and  finally  bounded  over  a  rise  and  down 
into  a  wide,  shallow  bowl  of  plain.  Two  little  dots 
in  the  distance  suddenly  woke  up,  and  two  Cossack 
outposts  who  had  probably  been  waiting  for  us  for 
hours,  for  we  were  half  a  day  late,  flung  themselves 

88 


AT    THE    FRONT 

on  their  horses  and  galloped  toward  us.  The  chauf- 
feur of  the  first  machine  motioned  with  his  gantlet; 
with  the  same  bored  gesture  he  would  have  used 
in  a  city  street,  and  the  Cossacks,  bringing  down 
their  knouts  and  flinging  their  horses  about  with 
w^hat  should  have  been  a  magnificent  gesture,  fled 
down  the  road. 

The  only  thing  that  dimmed  its  magnificence, 
for  they  rode  beautifully,  was  the  invention  of  the 
automobile  and  the  cruel  and  cynical  ease  with 
which  these  soulless  contraptions  of  steel  and  gas 
only  purred  a  bit  heavier  and  were  always  at  their 
heels.  Horses  and  riders  doubled  up  every  now  and 
then  and  leaped  like  greyhounds,  rifles  bumping 
on  the  men's  shoulders,  and  the  motors  purred  and 
snorted  lazily  after — two  ages  and  two  civilizations 
racing  there  down  the  soggy  road. 

One  felt  something  of  this  sort  all  the  rest  of  that 
brief  afternoon,  as  if  one  had  sHpped  back  almost 
to  the  time  of  Riepin's  picture  of  "The  Cossack's 
Reply,"  or  back',  at  any  rate,  to  a  day  when  war 
was  every  man's  business  and  a  matter  of  riding 
and  singing  and  drinking  and  miming  off  with 
enemy  princesses,  instead  of  huddling  in  a  trench 
waiting  to  be  squashed  by  unthinking  shells. 

We  rolled  into  a  shabby  little  thatched  village 
and  stopped  at  a  farmhouse  gate,  where  already  a 
bright-eyed  Uttle  oflicer  in  a  long,  wine-colored 

89 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

Cossack  coat  with  white  cartridge-cases  across  the 
chest,  curved  sword,  and  dagger,  came  out  to  greet 
us.  He  was  as  keen  as  a  race-horse — a  true  colonel 
of  Cossacks  in  every  inch  of  his  slim  muscular  shape, 
from  his  rakish  Astrakhan  hat  down  to  the  toes  of 
his  soft  boots,  if  there  ever  was  one. 

They  had  been  waiting  for  hours,  and  both  of  us 
had  had  lunch,  but  hospitahty  w^ould  permit  no 
mention  of  this,  and  we  were  promptly  ushered  in 
to  begin  another  long  dinner  at  four  in  the  after- 
noon. No  abandoned  country  house  here,  nor  the 
amenities  of  a  corps  headquarters — only  a  villager's 
cottage  swarming  with  flies,  and  a  welcome  fairly 
to  blow  your  hat  off. 

Hardly  had  we  sat  down  when  the  little  colonel 
was  on  his  feet,  firing  off  a  speech  of  welcome  in 
such  a  staccato  Russian  that  even  our  Russian  com- 
panions could  scarce  understand  it.  At  the  end  he 
flung  up  his  glass  with  a  "  ra-ra-ra-ra ! "  rapped  out 
in  one  elongated  syllable.  Instantly  the  whole 
roomful  of  officers  joined  in,  and  this  cheering  con- 
tinued for  ten  or  fifteen  seconds,  the  little  colonel 
coming  in  with  another  of  his  "  ra-ra-ra-ras ! "  like 
a  whip,  every  time  it  seemed  to  show^  signs  of  dying 
down.  Meanwhile,  fifteen  or  twenty  tall  troopers 
had  gathered  in  the  yard  outside  the  open  windows, 
and  as  soon  as  there  was  a  lull  they  began  to  sing 
the  song  with  which  the  Cossack  welcomes  his  guest 

90 


AT   THE    FRONT 

and  asks  that  God  be  with  him,  with  its  plaintive, 
many-times-repeated  refrain: 

"Allah  verdie  !    Al-lah'  verdie  /'' 

The  Cossacks  differ  from  most  Russians  in  that 
they  have  been  treated  as  an  essentially  military 
part  of  the  population,  and  in  return  for  land  grants 
and  certain  other  privileges,  have  been  subject  to 
military  service  the  greater  part  of  their  lives. 
This  fact  and  their  skill  as  horsemen  have  given 
them  most  of  the  jobs  of  rough  poUcing  in  peace 
times  and  a  reputation  outside  of  Russia  which 
the  individual  Cossack  by  no  means  deserves. 
These  men  were  grave,  upstanding,  handsome 
fellows,  farmers  or  cattlemen  in  peace  times,  and 
very  much  such  a  regiment  of  rough  riders  as 
general  conscription  would  call  out  in  our  own 
ranch  country.  The  men  outside  had  scarcely 
finished  their  "Allah  verdie^'  when  the  colonel's 
aide,  very  much  such  another  live  wire,  struck  up 
a  song.  They  had  made  humorous  verses  for  most 
of  the  staff  and  even  one  for  the  guests  in  which 
"Pressa"  rhymed  with  "Progressa,''  and  the  aide 
sang  the  verses,  the  whole  roomful  joined  in  the 
chorus,  at  the  end  of  which  everybody  jumped  up 
and  drank  the  health  in  native  red  Caucasus  wine 
which  they  had  brought  in  old-fashioned  style  in 
skins  from  home. 

The  soldiers  outside  started  to  dance,  and  the 

91 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

nimble  aide  promptly  hopped  out  of  the  window, 
beckoning  after  him  another  officer.  They  motioned 
the  men  away  and  themselves  began  dancing,  the 
aide  slashing  the  air  in  front  of  his  partner's  face 
and  all  about  him  with  two  ferocious-looking  dag- 
gers. This  partner  was  surely  one  of  the  hand- 
somest men  that  ever  wore  a  uniform — tall,  with 
the  fine  shoulders  and  long,  slender  waist  which 
the  Cossack  uniform  sets  off  at  its  best,  a  high-bred 
face  with  drooping  mustaches,  wide-apart,  dreamy 
eyes,  and  such  a  slumbering-tiger  way  of  vaguely 
smiling,  twisting,  and  turning  in  his  soft  boots  as 
even  Mrs.  Elinor  Glyn  could  scarcely  have  imagined 
in  her  loftiest  flights. 

In  the  middle  of  the  dinner  we  received  a  visit 
from  the  general  commanding  the  Caucasian  Corps, 
of  which  this  was  one  of  the  units.  He  was  an  el- 
derly, little  man,  not  a  Cossack  by  birth,  who  had 
become  so  fascinated  with  them  and  their  uniform 
that  he  had  been  made  a  sort  of  honorary  Cossack, 
so  to  say.  The  cheers  and  toasts  began  again  with 
his  arrival,  and  then  the  health  of  the  guests  was 
drunk  by  countries,  and  one  of  the  Englishmen,  feel- 
ing very  properly  that  the  guests  should  do  some- 
thing, started  "Tipperary."  All  the  Westerners 
joined  in,  and  the  song  was  received  by  the  Cos- 
sacks with  wild  satisfaction.  Then  we  had  our 
photographs  taken,  there  was  more  dancing,  and 

92 


AT    THE    FRONT 

even  the  colonel  himself,  not  to  be  outdone,  jumped 
into  the  circle  and  bounded  about  like  a  panther  in 
his  hght,  soft  boots. 

It  was  nearly  sundown  now,  but  they  were  not 
going  to  let  us  go  without  some  of  the  long  pro- 
gramme they  had  planned,  and  as  the  motors  started 
they  jumped  on  their  horses  and,  forming  ahead  of 
us  and  behind  us,  escorted  us  to  the  edge  of  the 
village,  where  a  smooth  hillside  rose  from  the  wide, 
unfenced  road.  Here  we  passed  them  in  a  sort 
of  informal  review.  They  trotted  through  various 
formations,  scattered  and  galloped  off  as  if  on  scout 
duty,  then  gathered  about  a  hundred  yards  down 
the  road. 

Then,  one  by  one,  yellmg  and  at  full  gallop,  they 
raced  past  us,  standing  on  their  saddles,  picking  up 
hats  from  the  ground,  flinging  themselves  off  their 
horses  and,  backward  or  forward,  on  again.  There 
were  all  the  things  one  sees  in  a  Wild  West  show, 
only  done  not  by  two  or  three  riders,  but  by  a  whole 
squadron,  and  each  man  in  full  uniform  with  a  long, 
tight-waisted  overcoat,  a  heavy  sabre  underneath 
it,  a  dagger  strapped  outside,  and  a  rifle  bumping 
on  his  shoulders.  There  were  several  falls,  one 
man's  horse  rolled  over  with  him,  and  he  was  carried 
away,  but  nobody  bothered  about  that. 

The  sun  had  gone  by  now,  and  the  twilight  held 
a  sort  of  afterglow  that  made  one  think  of  the  light 

93 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

of  the  WTiite  Nights.  Against  it,  the  church  or  the 
hills  behind  us,  with  its  beet-shaped  domes,  stood 
out  as  if  cut  from  black  cardboard,  while  it  still 
glowed  on  the  horsemen  riding  into  it  and  on  the 
barefooted  peasant  women  in  their  red  skirts  and 
white  kerchiefs  looking  on,  the  yellow  fields  and 
the  dust-colored,  thatched  village  now  turning  to 
purple. 

Little  spirals  of  smoke  rose  from  its  roofs  and 
spread  out  flat  in  the  still,  damp  air,  with  its  smell 
of  wheat  stubble,  and  above  the  meadows  and  in 
the  hollows  of  the  low  hills  mists  began  to  gather 
like  cotton-wool.  And  m  this  luminous  stillness 
with  war  scarcely  more  real  than  some  ancient 
chronicle,  the  horeemen  formed  again  down  the 
road,  and  together,  yelling  and  waving  their  sabres, 
came  flying  by  at  the  full  charge. 

They  formed  in  front  and  behind  us  again  as  the 
motors  started  and  so  trotted  along  with  us,  singing 
as  they  rode.  On  the  brow  of  the  last  hill  they  drew 
up  at  our  right  on  a  rising  bit  of  ground.  The  colonel, 
flinging  his  bridle-wise  horse  this  way  and  that, 
shook  hands  with  his  guests,  and  then  they  all 
stood  in  their  high  saddles  and  cheered  as  we  drove 
away. 

It  was  dark  when  the  motor-lamps,  flashing  up 
a  black  tunnel  in  the  trees,  lit  a  courtyard  and  the 
front  of  what  looked  like  another  country  house. 

94 


AT    THE    FRONT 

It  had  been,  it  seemed,  a  monastery,  and  was  now 
a  coips  headquarters,  full  of  maps  and  telephone- 
wires,  orderlies  and  officers.  We  were  ushered  into 
a  long  room  with  a  table  diagonally  across  it,  set 
for  tea,  and  received  by  the  chief  of  staff.  He  sat 
down  at  the  head,  and  in  the  most  charmingly  in- 
formal yet  authoritative  fashion  talked  now  in 
EngHsh,  now  in  French,  with  now  a  word  or  two  in 
Russian,  about  the  war  in  general  and  their  special 
part  in  it. 

He  was  thoroughly  Russian,  and  in  his  big,  good- 
natured,  lounging  fashion  suggested  one  of  those 
bullet-headed  surgeons  one  sometimes  meets,  who 
is  careless  about  ever}iihing  except  his  particular 
technique.  With  his  arms  on  the  table  and  now 
and  then  running  a  hand  through  his  close-cropped 
hair,  he  described,  with  wash  drawings  showing 
every  bush  and  tree  of  the  enemy's  line,  what  they 
had  been  doing  lately.  There  had  been  a  "brisk 
little  brush"  here,  that  place  was  "rather  interest- 
ing," and  then  he  spoke  of  one  of  their  younger 
officers.  He  had  started  in  as  lieutenant,  gone  right 
on  to  lieutenant-colonel,  and  received  all  the  orders, 
including  the  EngHsh  Mihtary  Cross.  "He  got 
that  for  defending  a  machine-gun.  They  had  held 
on  until  help  came,  all  his  men  were  killed  or 
wounded,  and  we  found  him  unconscious,  with  his 
arms  clasped  around  the  gun,  and  eleven  bayonet 

95 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

wouiids.  He  got  over  that  and  went  in  again;  he 
went  through  everything,  that  boy,  and  then" — he 
tapped  his  forehead  with  his  forefinger,  "in  a  skir- 
mish— a  stupid  Httle  skirmish — and  not  even  in 
the  front  Hne !  .  .  ." 

The  candles  flickered  in  the  dark  monastery 
room,  orderlies  waited  against  the  wall  to  fill  our 
glasses  with  tea,  and  we  drank  a  good  deal  of  it, 
for  we  expected  to  spend  the  night  in  the  trenches 
and  not  get  back  until  four  in  the  morning.  That 
was  the  plan,  but  something  happened — some 
whisper  over  the  field-telephone,  some  rumor  in  the 
wind — and  without  quite  knowing  what  was  up,  we 
were  saying  good  night  and  starting  back  for  the 
train. 

A  full  moon  as  big  as  a  house  shone  through  the 
trees,  and  once  out  of  them  and  between  the  fields 
again,  we  drove  into  a  blue  sea  of  moonlight.  Thick 
scarfs  of  mist  lay  along  the  pines,  fog  blanketed 
the  lowlands,  and  moonlight  and  mist  together 
made  the  very  air  blue  and  turned  into  a  scene  from 
the  theatre  the  train  of  armored  motor-cars  lurch- 
ing past  us,  the  transport-wagon  hub  deep  in  mud, 
with  a  crew  working  round  it  with  lanterns,  and  a 
stretch  of  misty  pines  with  phantom  soldiers  round 
their  little  fires. 

We  were  to  have  gone  farther  south  next  day  to 
a  busier  army,  but  something  was  in  the  air — ^pos- 

96 


AT    THE    FRONT 

sibly  there  were  too  many  of  us — and  next  morning 
the  train  was  on  its  way  back  to  Minsk  and  thence 
to  Petrograd.  Of  the  Russian  fighting-machine  in 
action,  or  of  how  this  particular  part  of  it  might 
stand  up  to  its  work,  we  had  seen  Httle.  But  of 
Russians  themselves,  Russian  faces,  hospitality,  and 
recuperative  power,  we  had  seen  a  good  deal. 

These  armies,  with  everything  they  needed,  ap- 
parently, in  men,  food,  ammunition,  and  con- 
fidence, were  the  same  which,  just  a  year  before, 
had  been  falling  back  through  this  same  country 
at  the  rate  of  thirty  miles  a  day.  The  question 
every  one  was  asking  then — could  the  Russians 
come  back? — was  already  answered  in  Bukowina 
and  in  the  droves  of  prisoners  pouring  back  through 
Kiev.  But  it  was  answered  in  other,  and  perhaps 
as  significant,  ways,  along  this  comparatively  quiet, 
central  front.  Some  of  the  rifles  we  had  seen  came, 
very  likely,  from  little  basement  machine-shops 
in  Petrograd  side  streets;  some  of  the  shells,  per- 
haps, from  some  Moscow  cotton-mill,  laboriously 
turning,  on  lathes  set  up  since  last  summer,  or  for- 
merly used  for  something  else,  a  few  score  a  day. 
The  farmyard  hospitals,  the  stores  and  hospital 
trains,  were  the  work  not  merely  of  the  army,  as 
this  is  known  in  peace  times,  but  of  unions  of  rural 
governments,  of  cities,  of  committees  of  employers 
and    workmen — all    sorts   of   volunteer    organiza- 

97 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

tions.  One  of  the  significant  results  of  the  war  was 
the  practice  it  had  given  Russians  in  working  to- 
gether— a  team-work  destined  to  have  its  effect, 
not  merely  on  the  problems  of  the  moment,  but  on 
those  of  the  future  as  well. 


98 


IV 

THE  MOSCOW  ART  THEATRE 

The  theatre  itself  was  shallow  and  comfortable, 
a  thoroughly  modem  auditorium,  very  different 
from  the  huge,  old-fashioned  horseshoes  of  the 
Russian  imperial  theatres,  and  not  unlike  those 
which  have  sprung  up  like  mushrooms  in  New  York 
in  recent  years.  But  the  audience  was  the  other 
side  of  the  earth  from  Broadway. 

As  we  took  our  seats  and  looked  round  they 
seemed,  themselves,  as  interesting  as  a  play.  They 
were  young,  nobody  was  "dressed,"  and  all  seemed 
immensely  alert,  curious,  and  alive.  There  were 
students — boys  in  belted  blouses  and  girls  with 
short  hair — officers  in  all  sorts  of  uniforms.  There 
were  faces  which  might  have  been  those  of  Swedes, 
Spaniards,  Germans,  Turks,  or  even  remoter  Orien- 
tals— that  lack  of  uniformity  characteristic  of  Rus- 
sian theatre  audiences;  surprising,  sometimes  al- 
most eccentric,  contours,  as  if  the  modelling  were 
not  finished,  the  type  not  yet  set. 

About  them  all,  however,  was  the  air  of  having 
great  capacity  for  feeling,  for  being  moved  by  any- 
thing  beautiful,    tragic,    mysterious — any   intense 

99 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

reality.  There  were  yearning  eyes,  smouldering, 
melancholy,  mysterious  eyes,  eyes  that  suggested 
anything  but  champagne  and  lobsters,  or  any  cut- 
and-dried  or  merely  fashionable  ways  of  thinking. 
They  were  intellectually  ready  for  anything.  They 
might  or  mightn't  like  it,  but  there  was  nothing 
they  would  reject  offhand  merely  because  it  was 
unusual  or  "not  done." 

Then  the  curtain  rose  on  Chekhov's  "The  Three 
Sisters,"  and  at  once,  and  during  the  first  lines,  I 
was  conscious  of  one  of  the  most  vivid  impressions 
I  ever  had  in  a  theatre.  It  was  the  sensation  (and 
the  fact  that  one  understood  only  a  word  here  and 
there  seemed  to  make  no  difference)  not  so  much 
of  getting  mto  a  play  as  of  getting  into  Russia. 
And  not  merely  an  instant  of  Russian  life,  cut  out 
from  the  rest  and  intensified,  but  into  the  whole 
stream  of  influences,  inherited  and  otherwise,  which 
had  produced  this  family,  and  out  of  which  their 
lives  must  flow.  Here  it  is,  one  felt  at  once.  This 
is  Russia;  this  is  the  real  thing. 

Just  how  this  effect,  to  which  author,  players, 
stage-setting,  and  the  collective  enthusiasm  of  the 
audience  itself  all  contributed,  was  brought  about 
is  not  easy  to  explain.  There  was  nothing  unique 
or  startling  in  the  stage-setting — the  living-room 
and  part  of  the  veranda  of  a  comfortable  house  in 
a  Russian  provincial  town,  much  such  a  roomy  old 

100 


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THE    MOSCOW    ART    THEATRE 

frame  house  as  you  would  find  in  Columbus,  Ohio, 
or  Evansville,  Ind.  Interiors  just  as  realistic  have 
not  infrequently  been  built  up  around  the  bathos 
with  which  Mr.  Belasco  has  made  his  fame. 

Nor  has  Mme.  Knipper  (the  widow  of  Chekhov) 
nor  Miss  Germanova,  nor  Miss  Zdanova  any  unique 
personal  magnetism — the  sort  of  spell  with  which 
a  Bernhardt,  for  instance,  hypnotizes  almost  any 
spectator.  They  did  not,  indeed,  give  one  the  feel- 
ing of  being  actresses  at  all  in  the  sense  of  belong- 
ing to  any  queer  foreign  world  composed  of  bill- 
boards, bunk,  and  photographs  in  the  Sunday 
papers.  Evidently,  these  sisters  were  regular  people. 
It  was  as  if  one  had  entered  a  family  composed,  let 
us  say,  of  Mrs.  Wharton,  Josephine  Daskam  Bacon, 
and  any  pretty,  wide-awake,  intelHgent  young 
cousin  of  yours,  just  out  of  Smith  or  Bryn  Mawr 
and  a  little  at  a  loss,  back  in  her  own  home-town, 
to  know  what  to  do  with  herself. 

The  audience  looked  into  a  living-room  behind 
which,  in  a  sort  of  enlarged  alcove,  was  the  dining- 
room,  and,  at  the  left,  the  end  of  the  veranda  out- 
side of  the  house.  The  elder  sister  sat  on  a  sort  of 
island  divan  in  the  middle  of  the  room,  reading; 
the  other  two,  facing  the  audience,  stood  by  the 
veranda  railing  looking  out  on  a  fine  May  morn- 
ing. 

Masha,  the  elder  sister,  played  by  Mme.  Knipper, 

101 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

was  in  black,  and  she  sat  bolt  upright,  her  fine, 
severe,  rather  disillusioned  profile  bent  unsmiling 
on  her  book.  Through  the  greater  part  of  the 
scene,  while  other  characters  came  and  went,  this 
rather  sinister  figure  remained,  a  silent  silhouette — 
and  this  was  typical  of  the  methods  of  the  theatre — 
paying  no  attention  to  what  was  going  on  about 
her.  One  could  not  know,  of  course,  that  she  had 
been  married  while  very  young  to  a  well-meaning, 
commonplace  boy  whom  she  had  now  outgrown, 
but  one  did  not  need  to  know  it.  Here,  evidently, 
was  a  sensitive,  high-strung  woman  suffering  in 
some  way  hard  to  change — that  was  plain  enough. 

Of  the  two  on  the  porch,  Olga,  the  middle  sister, 
was  in  dark  blue,  a  color  in  itself  suggesting  the 
middle  position  that  she,  as  a  teacher  in  the  high 
school,  held  between  the  unhappy  married  sister 
and  Irina,  who,  in  a  white  summer  dress,  was  smil- 
ing dreamily  at  the  morning,  all  her  life  before  her. 

For  a  moment  this  picture,  the  dark  silhouette, 
the  day-dreaming  figure  of  the  youngest  sister,  the 
more  serious  Olga,  was  held,  and  then  the  mood 
in  which  they  were  living  began,  as  it  were,  to  speak 
through  Olga's  soliloquy : 

It's  just  a  year  since  father  died  last  May  the  5th,  on 
your  name  day,  Irina.  It  was  very  cold  then,  and  snowing. 
I  thought  I  would  never  survive  it,  and  you  were  in  a  dead 
faint.     And  now  a  year  has  gone  by,  and  we  are  already 

102 


i 


THE    MOSCOW   ART   THEATRE 

thinking  about  it  without  pain,  and  you  are  wearing  a  white 
dress  and  your  face  is  happy.  [Clock  strikes  twelve.]  And 
the  clock  struck  just  the  same  way  then.  [Pause.]  I  re- 
member that  there  was  music  at  the  funeral,  and  they  fired 
a  volley  in  the  cemetery.  He  was  a  general  in  command  of 
a  brigade,  but  there  were  few  people  present.  Of  course,  it 
was  raining  then,  raining  hard,  and  snowing.  .  .  .  [Several 
officers,  friends  of  the  family,  enter  the  dining-room  at  the  rear.] 
It's  so  warm  to-day  that  we  can  keep  the  windows  open, 
though  the  birches  are  not  yet  in  flower.  Father  was  put  in 
command  of  a  brigade,  and  he  rode  out  of  Moscow  with  us 
eleven  years  ago.  I  remember  perfectly  that  it  was  early  in 
May  and  that  everything  in  Moscow  was  flowering  then.  It 
was  warm,  too,  everything  was  bathed  in  sunshine.  Eleven 
years  have  gone,  and  I  remember  everything  as  if  we  rode 
out  only  yesterday.  Oh,  God !  When  I  awoke  this  morning 
and  saw  all  the  light  and  the  spring,  joy  entered  my  heart, 
and  I  longed  passionately  to  go  home.  .  .  .  [Masha,  Ab- 
sorbed in  her  book,  whistles  softly.]  Don't  whistle,  Masha. 
How  can  you !  [Pause.]  I'm  always  having  headaches  from 
having  to  go  to  the  high  school  every  day  and  then  teach 
till  evening.  Strange  thoughts  come  to  me,  as  if  I  were  al- 
ready an  old  woman.  And  really,  during  these  four  years 
that  I  have  been  working  here,  I  have  been  feeling  as  if 
every  day  my  strength  and  youth  have  been  squeezed  out 
of  me,  drop  by  drop.  And  only  one  desire  grows  and  gains 
in  strength  .  .  . 

Ibina.  To  go  away  to  Moscow.  To  sell  the  house,  drop 
everything  here,  and  go  to  Moscow.  .  .  . 

There  you  have  the  manner;  and  indeed  the 
whole  story,  so  far  as  there  is  a  story,  of  Chekhov's 
"Three  Sisters."  Every  one  knows  girls  like  these, 
girls  who  have  come  back  home  from  college  or  a 

103 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

year  abroad,  have  not  married  nor  found  anything 
to  do.  Their  dissatisfaction  is  often  a  real  enough 
tragedy,  but  it  would  scarcely  occur  to  the  American 
writer  to  make  a  play  out  of  it.  He  might  make  a 
play  showing  how  such  a  girl  went  to  New  York 
and  went  to  the  bad,  or  stayed  at  home  and  cured 
her  blues  by  starting  a  Mar}^  Elizabeth  candy- 
shop  or  reforming  the  board  of  aldermen.  But  to 
make  a  play  out  of  mere  mooning  would  seem  to 
him  and  to  the  average  American  spectator  ab- 
surd. 

It  would  seem  so  because  such  behavior,  though 
common  enough,  is  absurd  in  itself.  There  is  no 
reason  why  the  sisters  should  not  go  to  Moscow, 
nothing  to  prevent  their  packing  up  and  taking 
the  next  train  except  the  fatalistic  Russian  habit 
of  saying  that  things  come  as  they  must  come  and 
all  is  for  the  best.  There  are  many  influences — and 
they  were  stronger  when  Chekhov  was  writing  than 
now-r-political,  geographical,  and  otherwise,  to  pro- 
duce this  habit  of  resignation,  and  a  stranger  feels 
them  even  after  a  few  months  of  Russia.  It  is  mi- 
necessary  to  go  into  them  here.  It  is  enough  to 
recall  that  this  habit  of  inaction  combined  with  a 
great  deal  of  philosophizing  exists,  to  understand 
the  effect  which  such  work  as  Chekhov's  has  on  a 
Russian  audience. 

The  tragedy  in  this  play,  as  in  "The  Cherry 

104 


THE    MOSCOW    ART    THEATRE 

Orchard,"  is  not  in  what  the  characters  do,  but  in 
the  fact  that  they  do  nothing.  And  as  played  by 
the  Art  Theatre  company,  with  their  affectionate 
care  for  every  reahstic  and  suggestive  detail,  it 
takes  a  Russian  audience  squarely  by  the  throat. 
They  see  their  own  souls  turned  inside  out,  and  the 
whole  theatre  is  hushed  for  a  moment  when  the 
curtain  goes  down  finally  with  nothing  changed, 
and  Irina,  looking  ahead,  Russian  fashion,  toward 
some  vague,  bright  millennium,  still  wonders  what 
all  their  present  suffering  is  for:  "If  we  could  only 
know,  if  we  could  only  know !  .  .  ." 

Questioning  like  this — "What  are  we  here  for?" 
"Why?"  "Where?" — comes  very  naturally  in  Rus- 
sia. There  is  something  in  the  air,  in  the  vast 
empty  spaces,  the  hard  climate,  slow  getting  about, 
the  dead,  unjdelding  walls  of  government  repres- 
sion— again,  I  speak  of  the  Russia  of  yesterday — 
which,  apart  from  an  inborn  mysticism,  induces 
such  thinking.  The  individual  is  turned  in  on  him- 
self just  as  in  such  an  atmosphere  as  that  of  New 
York,  for  instance,  he  is  turned  the  other  way,  and 
becomes  a  sort  of  child  at  a  three-ring  circus,  too 
dazzled  and  fascinated  by  infinite  possibihties,  by 
the  glittering  hullabaloo  of  life,  to  bother  about 
what  it  all  means. 

And  this,  of  course,  must  have  its  effect  on  the 
state  of  mind  in  which  people  go  to  the  theatre.    A 

105 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

Russian  audience,  or  at  any  rate  the  sort  of  Rus- 
sian audience  which  crowds  the  Art  Theatre  night 
after  night,  is  more  interested  in  imagination  and 
less  in  mere  novelty  and  theatric  invention  than 
ours — ^in  something  which  will  deepen  and  make 
more  rich  and  understandable  the  life  they  already 
are  living. 

Of  the  acting  it  is  perhaps  enough  for  the  moment 
to  say  that  it  aims  to  get  rid  of  the  usual  stage- 
tricks  and  to  reproduce  the  illusion  of  life  itself. 
Needless  to  say  the  artificialities  and  false  accents 
which  accompany  the  star  system  are  avoided  by 
such  a  company,  so  intent  on  the  business  in  hand, 
that  of  creating  a  certain  atmosphere,  that  they 
will  not  even  permit  the  spectators  to  disturb  it 
by  applause.  One  example  from  "The  Three 
Sisters"  will  suggest  the  general  tendency  of  the 
stage  management.  Audrey,  the  brother  of  the 
sistei'S,  is  married  to  a  plump,  empty-headed  diunp- 
ling  of  a  woman  who,  before  marriage,  thought  only 
of  clothes  and  coquetry,  and  after  it  is  ready  to 
sacrifice  the  whole  family  to  what  she  thinks  are 
the  needs  of  her  innumerable  progeny.  Audrey's  is 
one  of  those  serio-comic  tragedies — the  young  man 
of  imagination  and  promise  smothered  in  a  do- 
mesticity of  his  own  making. 

In  the  last  act,  when  the  regiment  is  moving  to 
another  town,  and  the  colonel,  who  has  brought  the 

106 


THE    MOSCOW    ART    THEATRE 

elder  sister  a  belated  glimpse  of  happiness,  is  say- 
ing good-by  probably  for  the  last  time,  when  Irina's 
lover  is  killed  in  a  duel  and  the  shreds  of  hope  to 
which  the  sisters  have  been  cHnging  all  seem  cut 
and  their  curious  passive  tragedy  nearing  its  climax 
— though,  of  course,  Chekhov-like,  there  is  no  climax 
— in  and  out  of  this  scene,  the  wretched  and  rather 
absurd  Audrey  moves,  slowly  pushing  a  squeaking 
baby-carriage.  - 

"What  is  become  of  ray  past,"  he  says  once,  "and  where 
is  it?  I  used  to  be  young,  happy,  clever;  I  used  to  be  able 
to  think  and  have  clever  ideas;  the  present  and  the  future 
seemed  full  of  hope.  Why  do  we,  almost  before  we  have 
begim  to  live,  become  dull,  uninteresting,  lazy,  useless? 
.  .  .  This  town  has  aheady  been  in  existence  for  two  hun- 
dred years,  and  it  has  a  hundred  thousand  inhabitants,  not 
one  of  whom  is  in  any  way  diflFerent  from  the  others.  There 
never  has  been,  now  or  at  any  other  time,  a  single  leader  of 
men,  a  single  scholar,  an  artist,  a  man  of  even  the  slightest 
eminence  who  might  arouse  envy  or  passionate  desire  to 
be  imitated.  They  only  eat,  drink,  sleep,  and  then  they 
die.  .  .  .  More  people  are  born,  and  also  eat,  drink,  sleep, 
and  so  as  not  to  go  silly  from  boredom  they  try  to  make  life 
many-sided  with  their  beastly  backbiting,  vodka,  cards,  and 
litigation.  Wives  deceive  their  husbands,  and  the  husbands 
lie  and  pretend  they  see  nothing,  and  the  evil  influence  op- 
presses the  children,  and  the  divine  spark  in  them  is  ex- 
tinguished, and  they  become  just  as  pitiful  corpses  and  just 
as  much  like  one  another  as  their  fathers  and  mothers."  .  .  . 

So  the  brother  speaks,  but  several  times  he  and 
the  squeaking  baby-carriage  only  trail  across  the 

107 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

scene,  like  a  musical  motif — a  typical  example  of 
their  method  of  giving  symbolistic  meaning  to  the 
most  natural  facts. 

Another  of  that  week's  repertoire  (no  play,  how- 
ever successful,  is  produced  for  more  than  two 
nights  in  succession)  was  "Autumn  Violins,"  apiece 
more  conventional,  about  a  woman  growing  old — 
just  entering  the  autumn  of  her  own  life — com- 
pelled to  see  a  man  she  had  loved  fall  in  love  with 
and  marry  her  own  daughter.  The  first  scene  was 
played  in  a  bright  living-room  through  the  tall  win- 
dows of  which  the  spectators  looked  out  on  a  land- 
scape in  the  height  of  its  autumn  coloring.  Just 
before  the  curtain  fell  a  single  autumn  leaf  came 
drifting  down  past  the  windows.  There  was  a  sim- 
ilar accompaniment  throughout  the  action,  and  the 
last  ironical  scene,  in  which  she  said  good-by  to 
the  young  people  starting  away  on  their  honey- 
moon, was  played  in  the  same  room,  through  the 
windows  of  which  the  audience  now  looked  out  on 
bare  branches  and  snow. 

Chekhov's  "Cheriy  Orchard,"  Maeteriinck's 
"Blue  Bird,"  an  ingenious  arrangement  of  Dickens's 
"Cricket  on  the  Hearth,"  and  Gorky's  "Lower 
Depths"  were  also  played  that  week — "The  Cricket 
on  the  Hearth"  at  the  Studio,  a  tiny  theatre  used 
by  the  younger  members  of  the  organization  as  a 
sort  of  experimental  stage. 

108 


THE    MOSCOW    ART    THEATRE 

The  Gorky  play,  at  least  in  part,  was  played  in 
New  York  about  ten  years  ago  by  the  German 
company  at  the  Irving  Place  Theatre  imder  the 
title  "An  Asylum  for  the  Night."  It  is  a  series  of 
character  sketches  strung  on  a  shght  thread  of  ac- 
tion taking  place  in  one  of  the  Moscow  under- 
ground lodging-houses  where  human  driftwood  of 
all  sorts — ^beggars,  pilgrims,  drunken  workmen,  a 
woman  dying  of  tuberculosis,  a  broken-down  actor, 
a  decayed  nobleman — huddle  for  the  night.  It  is 
stuff  of  which  everything  or  nothing  can  be  made 
according  to  the  acting  and  stage  managing  and 
the  success  with  which  a  thousand  little  details 
are  thought  out  and  merged  into  a  harmonious 
whole.  It  is  just  the  thing,  naturally,  for  the  imag- 
inative naturalism  of  the  Art  Theatre,  and  to  see 
this  piece  played  there — all  these  perfectly  realized 
types  immersed  in  an  indescribably  Russian  at- 
mosphere of  good  nature,  slovenliness,  and  vague 
philosophizing,  sense  of  sin,  of  failure,  and  yet  of 
faith — is,  within  the  short  space  of  an  evening,  al- 
most to  have  lived  through  years  of  that  side  of 
Russian  life  itself. 

The  production  of  "The  Blue  Bird,"  while  both 
fresher  and  more  vigorous  than  any  I  have  seen  in 
the  West,  differed  less,  of  course,  than  essentially 
Russian  pieces.  In  one  way  it  was  a  great  improve- 
ment.   There  was  no  attempt  to  have  the  parts  of 

109 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

Tiltil  and  Mitil  played  by  children.  They  were 
played  by  grown-jips  small  enough  to  make  up 
successfully  and  mature  enough  to  give  the  lines 
the  understanding  they  deserve.  The  Art  Theatre 
has  two  players  extraordinarily  fitted  for  such  parts. 
Miss  Durasova  can  play  a  boy's  part  with  all  of 
Miss  Adams's  charm  and  none  of  her  mannerisms 
and  mawkishness,  and  little  Miss  Giatzintova  can 
think  like  an  accomplished  artist  and,  in  some  be- 
wildering fashion,  look  exactly  like  a  little  ten-year- 
old  girl.  In  the  scene  of  the  Unborn  Children,  where 
grown  women,  dressed  in  a  sort  of  nun's  costume, 
represented  the  children's  souls,  the  effect  was  less 
happy,  I  thought,  than  in  its  representation  here. 

One  dramatic  form  in  which,  so  far  as  I  know, 
the  Art  Theatre  is  the  pioneer,  is  that  of  presenting 
novels  not  in  a  dramatization  but  literally.  That 
is  to  say,  instead  of  turnmg  over  a  good  book  to 
a  hack  dramatist  to  be  turned  into  a  bad  play,  the 
dialogue  is  played  literally,  without  change,  and 
the  narrative  filled  in  by  stage  managing  or  by  read- 
ing passages  from  the  book  itself.  So  huge  and 
shapeless  a  mass  as  Dostoyevski's  "The  Brothei-s 
Karamazoff  "  has  been  played  with  great  success,  and 
the  same  method  was  followed  with  "The  Cricket 
on  the  Hearth." 

The  Studio  Theatre,  in  which  this  was  given,  is 
a  real  little  theatre,  \vithout  footlights  and  with  a 

110 


THE    MOSCOW    ART    THEATRE 

slanting  tier  of  seats  somewhat  like  those  in  a  col- 
lege lecture-room.  The  audience  is  made  up  mostly 
of  relatives  and  friends,  and  it  is  not  always  easy  for 
outsiders  to  get  tickets.  The  house  was  darkened 
for  a  few  moments  before  the  play  b^gan,  and  out  of 
this  darkness  at  one  side  of  the  stage  there  appeared 
a  glow  and  in  it  a  benign,  Christmasy-looking  old 
gentleman  seated  by  a  fireplace,  his  face  lit  by  the 
fire.  "The  kettle  began  it,"  he  said,  smiling  toward 
the  audience  with  the  air  of  one  telling  stories;  then 
went  on  repeating  the  introductory  chapter,  or  at 
least  parts  of  it,  just  as  written.  The  chirping  of 
a  cricket  and  the  curious  bubbling  of  a  teakettle 
accompanied  him,  and  presently  he  faded  out  and 
the  curtain  went  up  on  the  interior  of  the  cottage 
of  John  and  Mary  Periwinkle.  There  were  four 
scenes,  the  first  and  last  in  the  cottage,  the  other 
two  in  the  toymaker's  shop,  and  all  played  with 
such  spontaneous  charm  and  so  smoothed  together 
that  a  stranger  would  have  had  no  feeling  that  the 
whole  had  not  been  originally  written  as  a  play. 
It  was  not,  compared  with  Chekhov,  a  wildly  ex- 
citing evening,  but  it  gave  this  audience  of  Rus- 
sians, many  of  whom  could  not  have  read  the 
original,  a  surprisingly  accurate  notion  of  the  feel- 
ing and  flavor  of  Dickens's  story. 

None  of  these  plays,  it  will  be  observed,  are  of 
the  sort  to  which  one  goes  merely  for  amusement 

111 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

in  the  sense  that  one  goes  to  a  good  melodrama — a 
perfectly  sound  sort  of  entertainment  in  itself — 
they  all  meet  the  demand,  not  necessarily  Russian, 
for  something  spiritually  nourishing,  something 
that  does  not  merely  pass  over  the  skin  like  a  cold 
shower-bath  but  warms  a  person  up  inside,  stays 
with  him  and  broadens  the  consciousness  of  life 
with  which  he  already  starts.  Yet  the  Art  Theatre 
is  sold  out  every  night,  even  when  plays  are  pre- 
sented which  have  been  in  the  repertoire  for  years, 
and  this  without  advertising  or  any  sort  of  exploita- 
tion except  the  mere  announcement  of  dates  and 
titles. 

Two  little  experiences  of  my  own  will  suggest 
the  theatre's  point  of  view  toward  newspapers  and 
the  public.  The  Art  Theatre  has  no  press-agent, 
but  there  is  a  secretary,  a  young  Greek,  Mr.  Lykiar- 
dopulos,  who  makes  translations — ^he  had,  interest- 
ingly enough,  just  translated  "The  Great  Divide" 
— and  now  and  then  deigns  to  meet  dramatic  re- 
porters and  give  them  a  little  news.  He  received 
the  annoimcement  that  I  contemplated  writing 
something  about  the  thp::.ire  with  complete  calm, 
and  when  I  rather  lavishly  ex-plained  that  I  should, 
of  course,  pay  for  seats  but  would  be  grateful  if 
he  could  assist  me  in  getting  them,  said  he  would 
see  what  could  be  done. 

He  went  to  the  box-office,  pushed  through  the 

112 


THE    MOSCOW    ART    THEATRE 

line,  spoke  with  the  ticket-seller,  and,  handing  me 
tickets  for  several  performances,  said:  "Twenty- 
six  rubles,  please."  I  spoke  about  photographs  of 
the  company — would  it  not  be  possible  to  come  some 
day  and  take  a  few  informal  snapshots  ?  The  secre- 
taiy  said  he  would  see.  When  I  called  next  day 
he  reported  that  he  was  sorry,  but  his  colleagues 
said  that  photographs  of  themselves  in  costume 
could  be  obtained  at  the  regular  dealers  in  such 
things — their  personal  lives  were  their  own,  and 
they  did  not  care  to  have  pictures  taken. 

And  yet,  with  this  complete  independence,  their 
theatre  pays  not  only  its  expenses,  which  now 
amount  to  about  three  hundred  and  seventy-five 
thousand  dollars,  but  a  profit  of  between  twenty- 
five  thousand  dollars  and  forty  thousand  dollars  to 
the  shareholders,  who  are  the  players  themselves 
or  others  directly  employed  in  the  theatre.  It  must 
not  be  assumed,  however,  that  this  was  done  in  a 
minute  nor  without  a  lot  of  hard  work.  Even  the 
Russian  pubhc  had  to  be  educated  and  a  great  lot 
of  experimenting  done  before  the  theatre's  posi- 
tion was  thus  established.  It  was  started  in  1897, 
not,  like  our  ill-fated  New  Theatre,  as  a  sort  of 
American  millionaires'  adaptation  of  the  endowed 
state  theatre,  nor  by  an  owner-manager  like  Mr. 
Ames's  Little  Theatre,  but  by  the  workers  them- 
selves.    Its  beginning  was  more  after  the  fashion 

113 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

of  the  Washington  Square  Players  and  the  other 
amateur  companies  which  have  popped  up  of  late 
years  in  New  York. 

Two  men,  Nerairovitch-Dantchenko,  a  Moscow 
dramatist  and  dramatic  critic,  and  Constantine 
Stanislavsky,  a  member  of  a  rich  Moscow  family 
who  had  done  a  good  deal  of  amateur  acting,  or- 
ganized a  stock  company.  Stanislavsky  is  still 
the  company's  principal  actor  and  teacher,  and 
the  theatre  is  often  spoken  of  under  his  name. 
Several  Moscow  merchants  subscribed  enough — 
only  about  fifteen  thousand  dollars — for  a  start; 
a  bam  on  the  country-place  of  one  of  the  members 
was  turned  into  a  theatre,  and  here,  cooking  their 
own  meals,  making  their  own  costumes  and  scenery, 
the  company  rehearsed  five  plays,  "Tsar  Feodor 
Ivanovitch,"  a  seventeenth-century  historical  play 
by  Count  Alexis  K.  Tolstoy,  Sophocles's  "An- 
tigone," Goldoni's  "La  Locandiera,"  Shakespeare's 
"Tlie  Merchant  of  Venice,"  and  Hauptmann's 
"Hannele."  The  theatre  opened  on  October  14, 
1898,  with  "Tsar  Feodor  Ivanovitch,"  stiU  a  part 
of  the  repertoire.  "Hannele"  was  forbidden  by  the 
censor,  the  other  plays  were  not  successful,  and 
Chekhov's  "Sea  Gull,"  which  had  already  failed 
at  the  Imperial  Theatre  in  Petrograd,  was  finally 
produced  as  a  sort  of  forlorn  hope.  It  was  a  tre- 
mendous success,  and  a  sea  gull,  now  on  the  curtain 

114 


THE    MOSCOW    ART   THEATRE 

and  on  the  programme^  became  the  emblem  of  the 
Art  Theatre.  It  was  Chekhov's  plays  which  really 
made  the  Art  Theatre,  as  it  was  the  Art  Theatre 
which  made  Chekhov  a  dramatist. 

Although  the  first  year  was  a  great  artistic  suc- 
cess, it  finished  with  a  deficit  of  about  twenty  thou- 
sand dollars,  which  was  met,  as  were  the  deficits 
of  the  succeeding  five  years,  by  several  Moscow 
merchants.  Ibsen  was  produced  in  these  years, 
with  Hauptmann,  Gorky,  and  Chekhov,  and  in 
1902  a  music-hall  was  remodelled  into  the  present 
modem  theatre. 

During  the  revolution  of  1905,  while  the  theatre 
was  closed,  the  company  toured  Germany  and 
Austria,  and  a  few  years  later  organized  on  their 
present  basis — a  more  or  less  co-operative  stock 
company  of  one  hundred  actors,  actresses,  and 
students,  with  another  hundred  musicians,  scene- 
shifters,  wig-makers,  etc. 

The  acting  has  gone  through  several  phases.  At 
first  it  was  an3^hing  to  smash  convention.  The 
players  even  turned  their  backs  to  the  audience 
sometimes,  not  for  any  reason,  but  just  to  show 
that  they  could.  In  a  parody  of  the  Art  Theatre's 
methods  at  "The  Crooked  Looking-Glass "  in  Petro- 
grad,  a  seat  with  a  high  back  was  turned  away  from 
the  audience  so  that  the  actor  sitting  in  it  was 
hidden  altogether,  and  again,  a  chorus  of  realistic 

115 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

barnyard  sounds — barking,  crowing,  bleating,  etc. — 
completely  drowned  out  the  actors. 

Realizing  presently  that  naturahsm  could  be 
run  into  the  ground,  the  company  swung  to  the 
opposite  pole  and  gave  a  series  of  symbolistic  plays 
in  which  eveiy-day  appearances  were  carefully 
avoided.  This  led  to  a  sort  of  merging  of  the  two, 
to  the  symbolical  realism  in  which  its  better  plays 
are  now  presented.  The  secretary,  in  telling  me  of 
their  theories  of  acting,  spoke  repeatedly  of  their 
endeavor  to  "live  into"  a  part,  and  he  said  that 
when  occasionally  they  did  take  on  a  professional 
actor  from  the  provinces,  the  first  thing  he  had  to 
do  was  to  unlearn  his  stage-tricks.  Each  play  was 
rehearsed  an  incredible  number  of  times,  I  do  not 
recall  just  how  many,  and  it  had  several  dress  re- 
hearsals— before  a  handful,  before  half  a  house, 
three-cjuarters  of  a  house,  and  so  on — before  it  was 
finally  offered  to  the  pubhc. 

The  success  of  this  Russian  theatre  gives  new 
interest  and  importance  to  the  many  efforts,  more 
or  less  serious,  Americans  are  making  to  escape 
from  the  banality  and  commercialism  of  our  own 
stage.  The  various  drama  leagues  showed  the 
stirring  of  ideas,  and  the  crop  of  little  independent 
theatres  which  have  sprung  up  in  New  York  and 
elsewhere  of  late  in  which,  sometimes,  amateurs 
write  and  act  their  own  plays,  really  constitutes 

116 


THE    MOSCOW    ART    THEATRE 

what  might  be  called  a  "movement."  Our  theatre 
is  ten  times  more  alive  than  it  was  a  generation  ago, 
and  the  commercial  success  of  one  or  two  of  these 
little  experiments  shows  that  Broadway  can  be 
beaten,  after  all. 

There  is  further  cheer  in  the  fact  that  even  the 
Russian  public  is  not  so  regenerate  as  to  feed  en- 
tirely on  such  work  as  Chekhov's.  During  this 
same  week  in  Moscow,  at  one  of  the  other  popular 
theatres,  I  saw  a  play  by  Artsybashev — with  a 
conventional  heroine,  who  loaded  herself  with 
clothes,  jumped  on  sofas  and  off  again,  coiled  and 
uncoiled,  and  continually  kept  breaking  the  pic- 
ture to  call  attention  to  herself,  in  quite  the  ap- 
proved Broadway  style.  Little  girls  with  pigtails 
down  their  backs  ran  down  the  aisle  to  be  nearer 
their  idol  as  she  bowed  to  the  curtain-calls — after 
flirting  in  the  play  with  every  man  and  boy  in  sight 
she  was  righteously  choked  to  death,  though  not 
soon  enough,  by  her  husband — and  doubtless  waited 
outside  the  stage  door  just  as  they  do  at  home. 

No,  the  course  of  true  art  does  not  run  smooth  in 
Russia  any  more  than  anywhere  else,  and  the  Rus- 
sians have  had  a  censorship  to  meet  in  addition  to 
other  troubles.  It  is  not  for  us  to  imitate  their  most 
characteristic  work.  We  are  a  different  breed,  too 
nervous  and  positive,  too  optimistic  and  impatient 
of  results,  to  have  any  strong  natural  appetite  for 

117 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

such  tragedies  of  inaction.  We  must  express  our 
own  life  and  times  in  our  own  way,  but  these  Rus- 
sians have  proved,  at  any  rate,  that  a  theatre  may 
exist  without  newspapers  or  press-agents,  and  ac- 
tors and  actresses  hve  as  artistically  free  and  self- 
respecting  lives  as  painters  and  novelists. 


118 


A  LOOK  AT  THE  DUMA 

The  place  of  representative  government  in  the 
Russian  scheme  of  things  before  the  coup  d'etat 
of  1917,  was  suggested  by  the  location  of  the  Im- 
perial Diuna  in  the  national  capital.  One  did  not 
find  the  Duma  under  a  dome  in  the  heart  of  Petro- 
grad.  It  was  far  away  from  that  vast,  cold,  im- 
pressive square — in  itself  a  symbol  of  autocratic 
power — round  which  are  grouped  the  red  piles  of 
the  Winter  Palace,  Foreign  Office,  and  Ministry 
of  War. 

The  people's  representatives  met  in  a  low,  white 
building — the  Taurida  Palace — some  distance  from 
the  centre  of  town.  There  was  a  pleasant  park 
and  lake  behind  it,  where  members  might  stroll 
when  debate  grew  tiresome — it  suggested  a  parlia- 
ment less  than  an  art  gallery  or  museum  of  history. 
And  the  Russian  deputy,  jammed  into  one  of  Petro- 
grad's  crowded  trolley-cars,  or  jogging  away  from 
the  Nevski  and  down  past  the  neighborhood  of 
embassies  and  legations,  behind  some  drowsy  izvo- 
schik  in  a  blue  overcoat  stuffed  like  a  Santa  Claus, 

119 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

could  scarcely  enjoy  the  sensations  which  inflate 
the  chest  of  an  American  congressman,  marching 
for  the  first  time  down  Pennsylvania  Avenue  toward 
the  great  gray  dome  of  the  National  Capitol. 

He  could  scarcely  nourish  the  illusion  that  he 
was  about  to  ascend  Olympus  and  look  down  on 
a  nation  looking  up  to  him.  He  knew  that  the 
Duma  had  been  "granted"  only  a  few  years  before 
and  was  not  something  created  in  the  beginning 
by  the  people  themselves,  that  it  had  been  dis- 
solved whenever  it  grew  too  obstreperous,  and  that 
at  any  time  its  sessions  might  be  stopped  again. 
It  might  pass  bills,  but  the  Upper  House,  the  Coun- 
cil of  Empire,  half  of  whose  members  were  ap- 
pointed by  the  Tsar,  could  always  kill  them,  and, 
although  it  might  question  ministers  about  their 
actions,  these  actions  were  beyond  its  control. 

It  was,  to  be  sure,  a  representative  assembly, 
with  rights  and  privileges  under  a  constitution,  a 
place  in  which  the  people's  delegates  might  talk, 
criticise  the  government,  and  get  their  criticisms  in 
print.  But  it  had  led,  since  its  enthusiastic  start 
in  the  spring  of  1905,  a  rather  drab  and  disappoint- 
ing existence,  and  about  the  best  that  could  be 
said  for  it,  even  a  few  months  before  the  overturn- 
ing of  the  old  regime,  was  that  it  was  a  symbol,  and 
sometimes  a  searchlight,  and  helped  to  start  along 
the  road  of  political  thinking  and  action  a  people 

120 


A    LOOK    AT    THE    DUMA 

used  to  taking  orders  and  having  their  poHtical 
thinking  done  for  them. 

I  talked  one  day  with  Professor  Paul  Miliukov, 
Minister  of  Foreign  Affairs  under  the  new  govern- 
ment, and  before  the  revolution  leader  of  the  Con- 
stitutional Democrats,  or  Cadets,  as  they  are  called. 
Professor  Miliukov  knows  his  own  country,  about 
whose  histoiy  he  has  lectured  and  written;  he  is 
an  authority  on  the  Balkans,  and  especially  Bul- 
garia, whose  university  at  Sofia  he  helped  to  organ- 
ize. He  was  one  of  the  founders  of  the  Constitu- 
tional Democratic  party,  and  has  been,  perhaps, 
the  most  consistently  active  worker  in  the  Rus- 
sian liberal  movement.  He  gave  a  series  of  lectures 
in  Chicago  in  1903,  speaks  English  fluently  and 
is  familiar  with  our  point  of  view — is,  in  short,  a 
gentleman  with  whom  an  American  feels  at  once 
and  agreeably  at  home.  I  asked  Professor  Miliukov 
if  it  might  not  properly  be  said  that  Russia  would 
win  in  the  war  no  matter  what  happened.  He 
smiled  at  the  "whatever  happens"  and  remarked 
that  they  were  not  indifferent  to  military  results. 
"If  you  mean  win  in  our  eternal  war — ^yes." 
Russia  had  already  won  much  in  this  "eternal 
war"— the  struggle,  that  is  to  say,  toward  liberty, 
toward  all  those  ideal  ends  to  which  even  consti- 
tutional government  is  a  more  or  less  experimental 
step. 

121 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

In  the  Duma  itself,  the  war  had  brought  antag- 
onistic elements  together  just  as  it  had  brought 
together  hitherto  antagonistic  or  indifferent  classes 
of  the  Russian  people.  Reactionary  deputies, 
visiting  the  front,  saw  for  themselves  how  necessary- 
was  the  work  of  the  Union  of  Zemstvos  and  other 
volunteer  citizens'  organizations  in  supplying  the 
army  with  munitions,  clothing,  food,  and  hospital 
supplies.  They  saw  that  the  government  could 
not,  or  would  not  handle,  the  situation  alone,  and 
that  had  the  people  not  stepped  in  on  their  own 
initiative  the  army  would  never  have  recovered 
as  it  did  recover  from  the  defeats  of  1915.  Nearly 
everybody  saw  this,  and  the  hinderances  that  the 
government  kept  on  interposing  to  what  was  ob- 
viously patriotic  and  important  work,  and  the 
support  which  the  army  gave  to  these  citizens' 
unions,  strengthened  them  in  their  independence. 

The  war  had  been  an  education  to  millions  of 
peasants  and  given  them  lessons  in  keeping  clean 
and  fit,  if  nothing  else.  Raked  in  from  their  villages, 
they  had  travelled  hundreds,  sometimes  thousands 
of  miles,  to  the  training-camps  or  barracks,  often 
in  the  larger  cities,  and  then  travelled  farther  on 
to  the  front.  They  had  met  all  sorts  of  other  Rus- 
sians, and  in  Poland,  GaUcia,  and  Austria  seen 
methods  of  living  and  farming  more  advanced 
than   those  they  were   used  to  at  home.    When 

122 


A   LOOK   AT   THE    DUMA 

wounded,  they  were  sent  back  to  Petrograd,  per- 
haps, or  Moscow,  or  Kiev,  and  when  well  enough  to 
walk  out-of-doors,  saw  the  city  crowds  and  sights 
— parks,  churches,  even  the  paintings  and  statues 
in  the  museums,  with  some  bright  httle  volunteer 
Red  Cross  nurse  to  mother  them  and  explain  things. 
Outside  of  Russia,  meanwhile,  millions  of  supposedly 
educated  people  in  the  western  world  were  opening 
their  eyes  to  spiritual  quahties  in  the  Russian  people 
to  which  they  had  hitherto  given  Httle  thought. 

All  these  things,  and  particularly  the  practice 
in  national  team-work  which  had  come  to  the  non- 
bureaucratic,  intelligent  middle  class,  would  have 
reacted  on  the  people's  assembly  even  without  a 
revolution.  Even  with  it,  however,  it  is  just  as 
well  to  keep  in  mind  what  the  Duma  has  been,  what 
it  has  had  to  fight,  both  from  without  and  from  its 
own  inexperience,  and  to  take  into  account  the 
physical  indolence  and  vagueness  in  practical  things 
which  accompany  the  speculative  enthusiasm  and 
spiritual  fervor  of  Jlussians,  before  assuming  that 
the  millennium  is  going  to  be  reached  in  a  day. 

The  look  of  the  Duma  when  I  \isited  it,  on  va- 
rious summer  afternoons  in  1916,  was  not  unlike 
that  of  similar  gatherings  in  our  part  of  the  world. 
The  deputies  sat  at  desks  in  a  semicircular  hall, 
lighted  from  above,  with  a  president  or  speaker 
looking  down  on  them  from  a  desk  a  little  above 

123 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

the  tribune  into  which  each  deputy  ascended  as 
he  addressed  the  house.  Reactionary  delegates 
sat  on  the  right,  and  the  house  grew  more  hberal 
from  right  to  left  through  the  moderate  Uberals 
of  the  centre  to  the  Social  Democrats  of  the  ex- 
treme left.  There  were  a  dozen  or  more  political 
groups,  but  nearly  three-quarters  of  the  four  hun- 
dred and  forty-two  members  acted  together  in  the 
"Progressive  hlocJ'  This  coaHtion  occupied  the 
centre  of  the  house  and  included  the  Octobrists — 
so  called  from  the  Constitutionalist  Manifesto  of 
October,  1905 — ^led  by  Mr.  Guchkov,  Minister  of 
War  in  the  new  government;  the  Constitutional 
Democrats,  or  Cadets,  the  most  active  party  m 
the  house;  and  the  Progressives,  who  sat  between 
them. 

There  were  a  few  peasant  deputies  v\ith  trousers 
tucked  into  their  boots,  and  on  the  right  several 
priests  with  hair  falling  on  their  shoulders,  blue 
cassocks,  and  crosses  on  chains  hung  about  their 
necks.  Most  of  the  other  deputies  wore  conven- 
tional frock  coats  or  business  suits.  Some,  indeed, 
particularly  in  the  centre  of  the  house,  were  quite 
"western" — Mr.  Maklakov,  for  instance,  one  of 
the  Cadet  leaders,  and  perhaps  the  best  speaker 
in  the  house.  He  was  introducing  an  interesting 
and  important  bill  increasing  the  rights  of  peasants 
on  one  of  the  days  when  I  visited  the  Duma.    The 

124 


Priest  Deputies  to  the  Duma  strolling  beside  the  lake  adjoining  Taurida 

Palace. 


A  group  of  "Pristavs,"  who  acted  as  ushers,  vote  collectors,  etc.,  in  the 

national  Duma. 


A    LOOK    AT    THE    DUMA 

chamber  was  full  that  afternoon,  as  it  always  is 
when  he  speaks,  several  rather  long-drawn-out  dis- 
cussions of  what  was  happening  in  the  cold-storage 
warehouses  were  abridged,  and  the  deputies,  most 
of  whom  had  gone  out  for  a  glass  of  tea,  Russian- 
fashion,  before  Maklakov's  turn  came,  were  all 
ears  when  the  Cadet  deputy  ascended  the  tribune. 

The  Moscow  lawyer,  a  youngish,  middle-aged 
man,  with  a  short  beard,  wore  a  blue  sack  suit  and 
a  negligee  shirt  with  soft,  turned-down  collar  held 
by  a  clasp  pin.  He  had  just  come  down  from  the 
visitors'  gallery,  where  he  had  been  pointing  out  the 
sights  to  two  pretty  ladies — one  a  famous  Moscow 
beauty  who  had  evidently  come  to  hear  him  talk — 
and  his  whole  manner  was  wide-awake,  boyish, 
and  full  of  informal  charm.  He  spoke  rapidly,  with 
nervous,  forceful  gestures,  the  most  characteristic 
of  which  was  a  quick  jabbing  with  the  left  forefinger, 
and  no  attempt  at  formal  oratory — much  as  if  he 
were  an  American  lawyer,  or  architect,  or  reform 
candidate  for  mayor,  addressmg  a  club  of  men  he 
knew;  anything  not  tame,  prosy,  or  in  a  bureau- 
cratic way  cut-and-dried. 

Mr.  Maklakov  might  be  described  as  a  type  of 
the  westernized  intelligentsia — a  type  very  different 
from  that  which  we  generally  think  of  as  Russian 
at  home.  There  were  a  good  many  of  these  brisk, 
youngish  men  in  the  forefront  of  things  in  Russia 

125 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

at  the  moment,  men  not  ordinarily  in  public  affairs, 
but  brought  into  them  more  or  less  through  the 
volunteer  committees  formed  to  help  the  army. 
These  men  talked  in  frank,  clean-cut  fashion:  if 
they  said  ten  o'clock,  they  meant  ten  o'clock — or 
at  least  as  near  to  it  as  a  Russian  could  be  expected 
to  get — spoke  freely  of  difficulties  with  the  govern- 
ment; were,  in  short,  people  with  whom  one  felt 
at  once  that  one  could,  as  we  say,  "do  business." 

Mr.  Konovaloff,  one  of  the  Progressive  deputies 
— the  Progressives  are  a  shade  more  "Right"  than 
the  Cadets — and  Minister  of  Transportation  in 
the  new  government,  was  another  of  these  young 
men  in  politics.  Mr.  Konovaloff  is  of  the  third 
generation  in  a  family  of  cotton-spiimers  not  un- 
like the  family  whose  Moscow  cotton-mill  I  shall 
speak  of  presently.  They,  too,  have  their  great 
mill,  on  the  Volga,  with  model  workrooms,  work- 
men's barracks  and  cottages,  hospitals  and  amuse- 
ment places,  and  all  the  elaborate  machinery  for 
taking  care  of  their  employees  in  a  similar  semi- 
feudal  fashion.  His  own  part  of  the  business — in 
addition  to  the  mill  itself  the  company  has  branch 
offices  all  over  European  and  Asiatic  Russia — he 
had  practically  given  up  for  the  time  being  in  order 
to  serve  as  vice-president  of  the  War  Industrial 
Committee. 

This  committee,  formed  when  things  looked  bad 

126 


A    LOOK    AT    THE    DUMA 

in  1915,  endeavored  principally  to  supply  munitions 
just  as  the  Union  of  Zemstvos  aimed  principally 
to  supply  food  and  clothes  and  assist  the  wounded. 
Representatives  from  all  classes  of  Russian  industry 
were  on  this  committee  under  the  presidency  of 
the  Octobrist  leader,  Mr.  Guchkov,  and  there  was 
a  New  York  branch,  one  of  the  members  of  which 
was  Mr.  Peter  Morosoff,  part  owner  of  the  Moscow 
cotton-mill  already  referred  to. 

The  Union  of  Zemstvos  began  its  war  work  in  a 
small  way  with  the  personal  permission  of  the  com- 
mander of  the  Eighth  Army,  and  extended  it  until  it 
had  committees  working  on  all  the  fronts.  At  first 
they  tried  only  to  help  take  care  of  wounded,  and 
when  I  talked  with  Prince  Lvoff' s  secretary  they 
had  fifty  special  sanitary  trains,  were  maintaining 
one  hundred  and  seventy-five  thousand  beds  and 
making  ready  fifty  thousand  more.  In  the  Moscow 
government  alone  they  had  sixty  thousand  beds, 
although  most  of  these  were  outside  the  city,  the 
city  government  itself  looking  out  for  most  of  those 
in  the  town.  They  did  many  other  things.  In 
one  section  of  the  front  they  were  feeding  two 
hundred  thousand  civilians,  employed  in  digging 
trenches;  the  winter  before  they  had  sent  two  hun- 
dred thousand  sheepskins  to  the  Serbian  army; 
they  had  had  made  thirty-five  million  linen  suits 
for  soldiers  in  hospitals.    Discovering  that  a  large 

127 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

factory  was  making  an  absurd  profit  out  of  horse- 
shoes, they  arranged  that  this  simple  job  should  be 
attended  to  by  concerns  with  simpler  equipment 
whose  overhead  charges  were  less.  The  government 
kept  insisting  that  the  union's  help  wasn't  needed, 
prohibited  meetings  for  discussing  necessary  busi- 
ness, and  insisted  on  dealing  with  the  separate 
Zemstvos  instead  of  with  the  union,  but  the  union, 
knowing  that  it  had  the  army  behind  it,  went  on 
with  its  work,  nevertheless.  The  preparation  which 
such  experience  gave  for  the  final  defiance  of  the 
government,  and  the  Duma's  refusal  to  dissolve,  is 
obvious  enough. 

The  Duma's  spokesman  in  that  dramatic  moment, 
and  its  president,  Rodzianko  of  Ekaterinoslav,  is 
a  very  different  type  from  brisk,  rather  westernized 
yoimg  Russians  like  Maklakov.  Rodzianko  is  a 
Russian  of  Russians — in  appearance,  at  least  Mr. 
Chelknikov,  mayor  of  Moscow  before  the  coup 
d^etat,  is  much  such  another  man — ^big,  easy-going 
giants,  with  deep  voices  and  hea\y  wrists:  bears 
of  men,  with  no  visible  traces  of  the  soft-handed 
Byzantine  bureaucrat,  and  a  size,  slowness,  and 
capacity  for  fighting,  when  driven  to  it,  exactly 
like  bears. 

The  Duma  president,  like  most  of  the  deputies, 
is  a  landowner — he  has  enormous  estates  down  in 
the  southern  steppe  country — and  on  the  hot  summer 

128 


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A    LOOK    AT    THE    DUMA 

afternoon  when  I  talked  with  him  he  was  thinking, 
as  many  of  his  colleagues  were,  of  the  crops  and 
getting  home.  The  political  earthquake  was  then 
only  a  few  months  away,  but  I  doubt  if  he  antic- 
ipated it,  in  just  the  manner  in  which  it  came,  much 
more  than  I  did. 

"The  land  won't  wait,"  he  boomed,  rolling  back 
in  his  chair  and  squinting  at  me  out  of  slightly 
puzzled,  good-natured  eyes.  "If  the  crops  aren't 
good,  Russia  suffers.  And  the  army  suffers.  We 
must  go  home  soon." 

I  must,  he  said,  see  the  steppe  country — "not 
steps!''  he  chuckled — and  the  Volga  and  Moscow 
and  Kiev.  He  spoke  of  the  Zemstvo  Union  and 
was  evidently  anxious  that  I,  as  a  stranger,  should 
not  get  the  notion  that  they  had  any  poHtical  aims. 
They  helped  the  army  and  were  a  great  education 
for  the  people,  he  said,  but  they  were  not  plajang 
politics.  He  called  the  vice-president  to  join  him 
in  the  amusing  business  of  having  their  pictures 
taken — the  sort  of  man  one  would  like  to  visit  in 
the  country:  more  fun  there  than  in  the  chilly 
formahty  of  Petrograd. 

The  lobby  of  the  Duma  chamber,  the  Catherine 
Hall,  used  to  be  the  palace  ballroom.  It  is  a  huge 
and  handsome  hall  of  columns,  and  with  this  and 
the  park  and  tea-rooms,  the  deputies  were  com- 
fortable enough,  however  politically  circumscribed. 

129 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

It  was  interesting  to  the  foreigner  to  see  the  priests 
in  their  long  blue  cassocks  strolling  about  with  the 
other  poHticians — big,  handsome,  good-natured  men 
with  cavernous  voices,  and  hair  and  beards  like 
prophets.  Some  were  sleek,  and  comparatively 
urban,  one  or  two,  with  their  eyes  of  zealots  and 
hair  bleached  by  sun  and  rain,  might  have  just 
come  in  from  a  desert  pilgrimage.  All  sat  on  the 
conservative  Right. 

Another  decorative  figure  was  a  Cossack  deputy, 
Mr.  Karaoolov,  an  original  gentleman  who  in- 
sisted on  wearing  a  fancy  blue  bell-skirted  costume, 
such  as  his  ancestoi's  may  have  worn  a  century  or 
two  ago.  Somewhat  diffidently  I  asked  Mr.  Karaoo- 
lov if  one  might  take  his  photograph.  He  answered 
in  French  that  one  could,  and  led  the  way  to  the 
garden  where  he  stood  still  and  also  walked  toward 
me,  swinging  his  stick,  all  with  great  gravity  and 
good  humor. 

Two  of  the  deputies  of  the  Right,  Mr.  Purishke- 
vitch  and  Mr.  Markov,  were  generally  pointed  out 
to  strangers.  They  are  intransigent  reactionaries 
and  have  a  wide  notoriety  for  their  violent  senti- 
ments and  language.  Mr.  Purishkevitch,  for  in- 
stance, is  said  once  to  have  interrupted  Mr.  Miliukov 
while  the  latter  was  speaking,  with  the  comment 
that  if  he  did  not  spit  in  his  face  it  was  only  that 
lie  could  not  spit  far  enough.    Observations  scarcely 

130 


A    LOOK    AT    THE    DUMA 

less  picturesque  are  attributed  to  Mr.  Markov. 
In  private  life  the  latter  is  a  landowner  from  the 
Kursk  prairie  country  south  of  Moscow — a,  large, 
swarthy,  saturnine  man  with  a  mop  of  long,  stiff, 
curly  hair,  suggesting  the  old-fashioned  Indian 
medicine-man.  He  contented  himself  with  merely 
"staring  gloomily  at  even  the  most  liberal  speakers 
during  my  visits  to  the  Duma,  and  I  went  to  call 
on  him  one  day,  expecting,  and  perhaps  rather 
wickedly  hoping,  that  he  would  cut  loose  accord- 
ing to  popular  story.  Possibly  Mr.  Markov  himself 
suspected  this,  for  he  received  us — an  amiable 
interpreter  and  myself,  for  he  preferred  to  speak 
Russian — ^with  an  air  of  caution,  and  answered 
each  question  without  a  smile  and  all  the  states- 
manlike reserve  of  a  candidate  on  the  night  before 
election. 

I  asked  Mr.  Markov  if  he  thought  the  Duma 
should  be  done  away  with.  With  the  prefatory 
remark  that  his  party  was  united  with  all  the  others 
in  pushing  the  war,  he  opined  that  the  Duma  need 
not  be  done  away  with,  but  that  it  should  exist 
only  as  an  advisory  or  critical  body  and  not  "get 
between  the  Tsar  and  his  government."  He  did 
not  believe  in  making  the  ministry  responsible  to 
the  Duma,  preferring,  he  added  gravely,  our  Ameri- 
can system,  where  ministers  were  chosen  by  and  re- 
sponsible to  the  President. 

131 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

And  how  about  the  Union  of  Zemstvos?  To  the 
union  itself  he  was  opposed,  he  said.  Too  much 
pontics.  Too  much  talk  and  too  little  work.  There 
were  always  plenty  of  people  to  give  orders  and 
too  few  to  do  actual  practical  work.  In  his  "govern- 
ment," for  instance,  in  Kursk,  the  Zemstvo  was 
helping,  and  that  was  all  right.  So  should  all  the 
Zemstvos  help,  but  they  should  take  their  orders 
from  the  government.  The  necessary  central  power 
was  already  in  the  Ministry  of  War;  there  was  no 
need  of  another  government  within  the  govern- 
ment. 

Mr.  Markov  is  a  notorious  Jew  baiter,  and  when  I 
asked  him  what  was  his  plan  for  settling  the  Jewish 
question,  his  brow  clouded.  The  Jewish  question, 
he  said,  speaking  slowly  and  with  great  dignity, 
had  been  a  question  since  the  time  of  the  pyramids. 
The  pyramids,  or  at  any  rate  some  of  them,  had 
crumbled,  but  the  Jews  were  still  with  us.  Ap- 
parently there  was  no  solution.  There  was  nothing, 
certainly,  in  the  Palestine  notion.  They  would 
never  be  a  race  of  farmers,  for  they  were  money- 
lenders and  exploiters — exploiters  in  a  good  sense, 
perhaps,  but  still  they  would  live  off  other  people. 
An  economic  boycott  might  help  some — that  might 
at  least  drive  the  Jews  out  of  Russia  and  some- 
where else:  to  South  America  or — and  Mr.  Markov 
smiled  grimly — to  the  United  States. 

132 


A    LOOK    AT    THE    DUMA 

The  deputy  from  Kursk  was,  of  course,  a  famous 
wild  man,  yet  a  man  of  parts,  nevertheless,  and  his 
grave  assurance  that  the  Duma  oughtn't  to  "come 
between  the  Tsar  and  his  government,"  is  sugges- 
tive of  traditions  that  it  is  well  to  keep  in  mind  in 
measuring  the  tremendous  task  which  faced  any 
sudden  attempts  at  popular  government. 

The  bureaucracy  is  another  fact  which  may 
readily  be  misunderstood.  A  bureaucracy  is  one 
sort  of  civil  service,  and  the  Russian  bureaucracy,  in 
which  bureau-chiefs  governed  in  the  name  of  the 
Tsar  but  often,  in  practice,  just  about  as  they  pleased, 
differed,  roughly  speaking,  from  the  sort  of  civil 
service  we  should  approve  of,  in  not  being  subject 
to  control  by  the  people.  There  were  all  sorts  of 
bureaucrats,  good  and  bad,  and  imperfect  as  it 
w^as,  it  was,  nevertheless,  the  machine  with  which 
a  vast  amount  of  necessary  work  was  done.  To 
uproot  in  a  day  this  huge  administrative  network, 
down  through  the  various  grades,  or  chins,  of  which 
government  descended  from  Petrograd  out  to  the 
farthest  Siberian  village,  and  successfully  to  put 
something  else  in  its  place,  would  have  been  a 
miracle  which  such  men  as  Prince  Lvoff  or  Pro- 
fessor Miliukov  would  probably  be  the  last  to  at- 
tempt. 

Under  the  surface  unity  of  imperial  Russia  w^ere 
gaps  and  contrasts  and  hostilities  as  glaring  almost 

133 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

as  those  in  Mexico.  The  people  were  not,  in  a  na- 
tional sense,  politically  experienced.  There  was  no 
such  public  spirit  or  common  information  as  there 
is  in  our  newspaper-made  civilization,  where  an 
idea  launched  to-day  is  known  to  every  one  to- 
morrow, whether  it  originated  in  Maine  or  Cali- 
fornia. People  of  superlative  gifts  and  intelligence 
are  found  side  by  side  with  hordes  who  have  no 
gifts  or  information  at  all.  And  aspiration  and 
spiritual  enthusiasm  are  constantly  coupled  with 
physical  passiveness  and  indifference. 

The  Russian  moujik,  singing  at  his  work,  is  nearer 
the  tmth  than  we,  perhaps,  scowling  in  our  sky- 
scraper. But  that,  unfortunately,  is  not  the  point. 
He  must  learn  to  sing  in  a  world  of  machines,  and 
this  task,  which  the  western  world  hasn't  yet  solved, 
he  is  suddenly  asked  to  undertake  without  the 
western  world's  years  of  experiment.  Nevertheless, 
the  revolution  is  a  fact,  one  of  those  tremendous 
facts  which  suddenly  put  an  end  to  theorizing. 
The  Russian  people  insisted  on  running  their  own 
war,  the  Duma  refused  to  dissolve.  And  this  will 
and  initiative,  expressed  in  the  conduct  of  the  war, 
must  go  on  expressing  itself,  in  at  least  somewhat 
the  same  strength,  in  the  conduct  of  affairs  in  times 
of  peace. 


134 


VI 

RUSSIA'S  WAR  PRISONERS 

It  was  at  Kiev  that  I  met  that  blue-gray  tide 
of  captives  which  had  been  flowing  eastward  across 
Russia  ever  since  Brusiloff's  offensive  got  well 
under  way  in  June.  The  ancient  city  on  the  Dnieper 
had  long  been  close  to  the  fighting.  One  could 
still  see  the  emergency  bridge  which,  in  the  pan- 
icky weeks  of  1915  when  the  enemy  were  driving 
east  from  Lemberg,  had  been  flung  across  the  river. 
Now  that  victory  was  swinging  the  other  way,  it 
was  a  natural  concentration  point  for  prisoners, 
and  it  was  here,  in  a  big  fenced  camp  in  the  woods 
not  far  from  the  city,  that  most  of  those  swept  up 
in  the  Bukowina  fighting  were  herded,  sorted  out, 
and  reshipped  to  prison  camps  farther  east. 

Day  after  day,  through  the  short,  hot  Russian 
summer,  the  long  trains  of  cattle-cars  dumped  their 
fresh  thousands  into  the  big  camp  in  the  dusty 
pines.  The  Austro-Hungarian  Slavs  were  separated, 
generally.  Kiev  was  full  of  these  paroled  prisoners, 
still  in  their  faded  Austrian  uniforms,  sleepily  driv- 
ing transport  wagons  or  working  on  the  streets. 
There  was  little  fear  that  they  would  try  to  escape 

135 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

back  to  their  own  coiintr}^,  merely  to  be  sent  to 
the  front  again.  The  German-AustrianS;  Hun- 
garians, and  Germans  were  sent  farther  east — toward 
Kazan,  down  the  lower  Volga,  and  to  Siberia. 

Kiev  was  the  first  real  stopping-place  for  most  of 
them,  and  they  still  carried  some  of  the  air  of  the 
battle-field.  The  lightly  wounded  still  wore  their 
rough  field  dressings;  many  had  scarcely  got  over 
the  surprise  of  capture.  Team  spirit  still  held  them. 
They  were  still  soldiers,  fighting  men,  part  of  an 
army.  And  here  the  last  of  these  props  fell  away. 
They  were  no  longer  part  of  a  great,  onrushing 
organization,  no  longer  soldiers.  There  was  no 
more  vengeance  nor  hope  of  victory.  They  sud- 
denly became  nothing;  a  body  to  cover,  a  stomach 
to  feed;  stranded  human  cattle,  facing,  each  for 
himself,  the  vastness  and  mysterj'-  of  Russia — cold, 
distance,  a  hundi*ed  inherited  dreads.  An  English- 
man or  German  captured  on  the  Somme  might 
have  a  comfortable  or  micomfortable  time,  but 
at  any  rate  he  never  left  the  cosey  distances  of  west- 
ern Europe.  There  were  records  to  go  to,  easy 
communication  by  way  of  S\ntzerland;  it  was 
only  a  matter  of  a  few  weeks  before  his  family  knew 
at  least  where  he  was  and  where  letters  and  pack- 
ages might  reach  him. 

The  prisoner  in  Russia  faced  cjuite  another  pros- 
pect.   It  was  not  a  countr}^,  it  was  a  continent  he 

136 


RUSSIA'S    WAR    PRISONERS 

disappeared  in.  By  the  time  his  telegram  or  post- 
card with  the  news  of  his  capture  got  back  to  his 
home-town,  he  might  be  a  thousand  or  three  thou- 
sand miles  away  from  the  place  at  which  he  mailed 
it.  By  the  time  his  peasant  parents  had  scraped 
a  few  dollars  together  and  sent  them  to  Siberia, 
he  might  be  down  in  Turkestan  or  working  on  a 
railroad  up  above  the  arctic  circle. 

A  package  travels  all  the  way  from  Hungarj^  up 
through  Sweden  and  Finland  down  into  southern 
Russia  for  a  prisoner  who  left  three  weeks  before. 
The  package  is  heaped  with  others  like  it,  or  sent 
on  to  another  camp — b}^  that  time  the  man  has 
gone  somewhere  else.  In  the  banks  are  piles  of 
telegrams  two  feet  high — money-orders  for  prisoners 
whose  whereabouts  nobody  knows.  Post-cards 
from  hundreds  of  far-off  Austrian  and  German  vil- 
lages, helpless,  half-hopeless  little  messengers  sent 
out  into  the  Russian  unknown,  pile  up  in  neutral 
consulates — reHef  workers  go  round  mth  great 
packs  of  them,  hoping  some  day  to  deliver  one. 

Dearest  Son:  It  is  sixteen  months  since  we  heard  from 
you.  .  .  . 

.  .  .  It  is  eighteen  months  since  we  had  news  from  you, 
and  at  last  we  have  your  address  from  the  Red  Cross.  .  .  . 

Dearest  Child:  Your  card  has  come  to-day,  and  we  are 
very  sad  to  learn  that  you  are  so  ill.  God  grant  that  you  need 
not  die  in  that  strange  land.  We  pray  for  you  and  trv^t  in 
the  dear  God.     You  were  always  our  good  son.  .  .  . 

137 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

.  .  .  Your  postal  of  December  12  arrived  April  4,  and  was 
the  first  word  we  have  received.  Our  joy  was  indescribable. 
Haven't  you  got  anything  from  us — this  is  the  fifth  letter  I  have 
sent  f  I  wish  there  were  something  I  could  send  you,  if  you 
would  only  get  it.  For  eight  days  now  we  have  been  celebrat- 
ing the  dear  Easter  ;  it  is  already  the  second  which  I  must  go 
through  alone.  .  .  . 

I  had  turned  over  scores  of  these  lost  post-cards 
a  few  days  before,  from  mothers  and  wives,  and 
innumerable  little  Mitzis  and  Gretls. 

Your  dear  card  received  with  great  joy  and  thank  you  with 
all  my  heart.  I  cannot  understand,  Oscar  dear,  why  you  have 
heard  so  little  from  me.  If  I  were  only  a  little  bird  and  had 
two  little  wings  (wenn  ich  ein  Voglein  war  und  auch  zwei 
Fliiglein  hatte)  /  would  fly  to  you,  but  as  that  can't  be,  as  you 
know,  Oscar  dear,  I  can  only  stay  here  and  trust  always  in 
God  that  we  shall  be  together  again. — Elsa. 

One  more  kiss  and  greeting  from  far  away  from  thy — Elsa. 

Answer  soon,  O  mein  Herz  triigt  schwere  Schmerzen! 

— Elsa. 

Dear  Good  Son:  At  last,  after  ten  weeks,  again  a  sign 
of  life.  God  be  praised,  you  are  well,  as  you  write.  Is  the 
bullet  still  in  your  shoulder  and  doesn't  it  bother  you  f  I  have 
already  sent  some  money.  It  can  only  go  by  way  of  Siveden, 
but  perhaps  you  will  get  it.  It  made  10  kroner  (16  marks  30 
pfennigs  in  our  money),  and  it  must  he  changed  again  into 
rubles.  Fritz  writes  he  will  soon  come  on  leave.  Last  August 
on  my  birthday  he  was  home  for  the  first  time,  but  not  since 
then.  Sophy  will  also  come —  Ach,  could  you  only  come  too  ! 
The  time  must  come,  some  time.  You  aren't  quite  so  far  away 
now  at  any  rate.  How  did  you  manage  to  make  the  long  journey, 
you  ivho  always  find  it  so  hard  to  travel.    Did  you  meet,  in  Mos- 

138 


RUSSIA'S    WAR    PRISONERS 

cow  or  Orenburg,  any  comrades  from  Bunzlau,  or  Liegnitzf 
Lisel  has  surely  sent  you  a  photograph  of  herself  and  the  little 
fellow.  You  can  see  what  a  sturdy  youngster  he  is.  Lisel  has 
grown  a  little  thinner  in  the  face,  which  with  the  cotistant  worry 
is  Jio  wonder.  Doubtless  it  is  the  same  with  me,  but  now,  that 
I  have  news  from  you,  I  live  again.  .  .  . 

Dear  Husband:  Again  a  Sunday  and  so  alone — may 
my  patience  not  leave  me  !  During  the  last  week  I  have  helped 
every  evening  at  the  Schreiers\  Now  it  is  already  May  and 
still  our  common  wish  is  unfulfilled.  When  shall  we  ever  see 
each  other  again  f  I  cannot  even  think  about  it — it  goes  so 
slowly.  .  .  . 

Some  were  blunt  records  of  peasant  lives.  This 
from  a  \dllage  in  lower  Austria: 

At  last  I  have  received  cards  from  you.  Lunzer  Josef,  Josef 
Wangner,  Friedrich  Haller,  and  my  brother  Johann  are  dead. 
Your  brother  Josef  is  at  the  front.  Karl  is  at  home,  the  others 
in  garrison.  We  are  all  well.  Your  faithful  wife,  children, 
and  Hansi  {extra).  .  .  . 

Men  for  whom  messages  like  these  would  pres- 
ently be  searching — ^peasants,  professors,  every  sort 
of  central  Em-opean — came  pouring  off  those  trains : 
all  reduced  to  almost  common  anonymity  now, 
with  nothing  but  the  uniforms  they  stood  in  and 
a  few  Austrian  kroners,  perhaps,  stored  away  in 
packets  himg  round  their  necks.  They  did  not 
know  what  was  expected  of  them;  what  they  had 
to  expect.  They  might  be  here  days  or  only  min- 
utes.   Meanwhile,  two  things  must  be  done — they 

139 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

must  get  word  to  their  families  and  get  a  little 
Russian  money.  And  this  was  not  so  simple  as 
one  might  think. 

Each  telegram  had  to  be  read  and  stamped  by 
the  military  censor,  paid  for,  and  taken  into  Kiev 
before  it  even  started  on  its  uncertain  journey 
through  the  tangles  of  Russian  and  German  cen- 
sorships. It  took  time  to  learn  that  telegrams  could 
be  sent,  that  the  censor  must  stamp  them,  time  to 
find  him  and  get  the  thing  done,  then  they  had  to 
be  paid  for  in  rubles  and  kopecks  by  men  who  had 
only  Austrian  money,  if  any,  and  there  was  nobody 
whose  business  it  was  to  change  it.  There  was 
no  one  whose  business  it  was  to  take  telegrams. 
And  all  this  time  the  trains  were  switching, 
and  a  man  might  at  any  moment  get  his  orders 
to  go. 

Such  things  seem  trivial  enough  as  you  read  about 
them  with  food,  clothes,  and  freedom  to  move  about 
a  matter  of  course.  But  to  prisoners,  animals  in 
a  herd,  dependent  even  for  a  drink  of  water  on  their 
drover's  will — they  become  tremendous.  They 
may  never  see  their  families  again — to  go  away 
without  a  ruble  or  two  seems  like  jumping  off  a 
sinking  ship  without  a  life-preserver. 

It  is  in  such  situations  that  neutral  outsiders 
can  make  themselves  useful,  that  one  can  be  thank- 
ful there  are  neutral  outsiders.    If  any  one  doubts 

140 


RUSSIA'S    WAR    PRISONERS 

the  service  which  neutrals  can  perform  in  a  world- 
wide calamity  like  this,  he  might  begin  his  educa- 
tion by  spending  a  few  days  with  a  nurse  or  delegate 
giving  "material  rehef."  Nobody  bothers  much 
about  these  herds  of  prisoners — at  least  until  they  are 
shut  up  in  permanent  camps.  They  are  nuisances 
at  best — so  many  more  mouths  to  feed.  In  the 
end  and  aggregate  they  may  be  well  cared  for,  but 
hunger,  thirst,  and  cold  are  matters  of  hours  and 
minutes. 

Droves  of  men  come  in  with  nothing  at  all  but 
the  uniforms  they  stand  in — overcoats  and  blankets 
gone,  even  watches  and  finger-rings,  sometimes.  A 
neutral  relief  worker  can  bridge  over  some  of  the 
gaps,  do  a  few  of  the  things  that  nobody  else  will 
do.  It  is  also  his  job,  w^hen  prisoners  are  finally 
disposed  of,  to  look  after  some  of  the  more  im- 
material things  that  nobody  bothers  about — ^books, 
amusements,  letters  and  packages  from  home — the 
things  with  or  without  which  prison  life  becomes 
a  tolerable  penance  or  a  sort  of  inferno. 

There  is  need  of  such  work  in  all  countries,  but 
particularly  so,  perhaps,  in  Russia,  where  com- 
munication is  difficult  and  the  individual  was  more 
than  usually  unable  to  make  head  against  material 
circumstances,  against  that  vague  power  above, 
which  had  had  generations  of  experience  in  devising 
means  to  keep  people  from  getting  what  they  want 

141 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

— that  vast,  cold  negation  stretching  across  a  con- 
tinent. 

Swedes,  Danes,  and  Americans  were  all  helping 
with  prisoners  in  Russia.  There  were  American  Red 
Cross  doctors  and  nurses,  later,  all  withdrawn,  un- 
fortunately; there  were  delegates  from  the  Em- 
bassy and  the  Y.  M.  C.  A.  The  latter  had  been 
particularly  useful,  partly  because  the  Y.  M.  C.  A. 
delegates  were  doing  the  same  kind  of  work  for  Rus- 
sian prisoners  in  Germany.  One  of  these  delegates, 
Mr.  George  M.  Day,  a  man  fitted  for  his  task  by 
temperament,  knowledge  of  languages,  and  under- 
standing and  liking  for  the  Russian  people,  was 
working  at  Kiev  during  Biiisiloff's  offensive.  It 
was  on  some  of  those  summer  days  when  herds  of 
prisoners  were  quite  overwhelming  him  that,  through 
the  courtesy  of  the  prison  commandant,  I  was  per- 
mitted to  lend  a  hand.  Every  day  at  noon  he  went 
out  to  the  prison  camp,  loaded  down  with  under- 
clothing, socks,  towels,  and  handkerchiefs,  and  a 
great  roll  of  rubles  which  disappeared  like  a  snow- 
ball on  a  hot  stove.  Three  or  four  men  with  tele- 
graph blanks  and  an  unlimited  supply  of  money, 
clothing,  Russian  grammars,  and  other  things 
prisoners  want,  could  have  kept  busy  in  those 
crowded  days.  But  there  was  no  such  help  avail- 
able and,  even  had  there  been,  no  permission  to 
use  it.    Outsiders  are,  at  best,  under  such  circum- 

142 


RUSSIA'S    WAR    PRISONERS 

stances,  on  thin  ice.  They  are  dealing  with  the 
enemy,  and  face  two  dilemmas — the  impossible 
amount  to  be  done,  and  the  danger  of  overworking 
their  welcome  and  being  cut  off  altogether.  Day 
did  what  he  could,  with  tact,  patience,  and  under- 
standing. The  instant  "Herr  Konsul,"  as  most 
of  the  prisoners  addressed  him,  hove  in  sight,  stag- 
gering under  his  bundles  of  clothes,  the  men  flocked 
around  like  chickens  around  the  farmer's  wife. 
Running  along  beside  him,  getting  in  front,  click- 
ing their  heels  and  snapping  their  hands  to  their 
caps,  they  pursued  him  until  he  left  at  sundown 
with  the  work  only  half  done. 

Dozens  had  their  censored  telegrams  ready  and 
waiting,  only  two  words,  generally,  and  the  ad- 
dress :  " Gesund — gefangen^'  {" prisoner — all  right "). 
Under  a  tree,  or  at  one  of  the  long,  outdoor  tables, 
with  the  men  crowding  round,  he  comited  the  words 
and  told  how  much  the  message  cost.  Few  had  Rus- 
sian money  or  had  the  right  change.  The  telegrams 
took  an  endless  amount  of  small  change.  They 
pooled  their  telegrams,  and  a  man  who  had  money 
paid  for  three  or  four  of  his  friends',  or — send  them, 
they  would  say,  never  mind  the  change. 

Everj'-body  wanted  money.  There  were  hun- 
dreds, sometimes  thousands,  of  Austrian  kronen 
to  be  changed  into  rubles,  and  in  eveiy  sort  of  odd 
amount.     The  comparatively  personal  and  casual 

143 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

nature  of  the  relief  work  necessarily  made  the  avail- 
able capital  small,  and,  even  as  it  was,  Day  spent 
most  of  the  morning  at  the  banks  trying  to  change 
the  big  pack  of  kronen  notes  he  had  collected  the 
afternoon  before  into  rubles  again.  Rarely  was 
there  enough  to  go  round;  sometimes  not  half 
enough. 

With  their  bewildered  ''hittes/'  they  pushed  up 
in  droves.  ''Bitte,  Herr  Konsul  .  .  .  only  three 
kronen.  .  .  .  But  they  couldn't  wait  till  to-mor- 
row .  .  .  they  were  already  ordered  on  the  train 
— schon  einwagoniert !  .  .  ." 

The  clever  ones,  understanding  how  hard  it  was 
to  make  change,  put  their  money  together,  trusting 
to  di\'ide  their  rubles  later  on.  Others,  big,  dazed 
peasant  soldiers,  with  thick  fingers,  shuffled  up 
hanging  on  to  all  they  had — some  ragged  little 
two-kronen  note — about  forty  cents.  For  these 
small  bills  the  Kiev  banks  paid  only  thirty  kopecks 
to  the  crown,  about  half  of  their  worth  at  home. 
And  three  twenty-kopeck  stamps  for  a  two-crown 
note  (paper  stamps  have  been  used  in  Russia  for 
kopecks  since  the  war)  seemed  nothing  at  all.  For 
bills  of  ten  crowns  or  over  the  banks  paid  thirty- 
seven  kopecks  to  the  crown,  and  for  gold,  forty- 
five  kopecks. 

These  odd  fractional  amounts  called  for  an  end- 
less supply  of  small  money,  and  two  or  three  men 

144 


RUSSIA'S    WAR    PRISONERS 

were  always  waiting,  until,  by  some  hocus-pocus, 
we  were  able  to  make  change.  There  was  one 
particularly  patient  old  German,  a  man  of  forty- 
five  or  fifty,  who  came  back  again  and  again  one 
afternoon,  each  time  to  ask  in  the  politest  way  if 
we  couldn't  change  a  few  marks,  and  finally  came 
too  late,  just  after  the  last  of  the  Russian  money 
was  gone.  To-morrow,  I  told  him,  but  the  next 
day  he  was  gone — off  to  the  East  somewhere,  good- 
ness knows  where.  And  things  like  this  were  al- 
ways happening.  Clumping  back  to  Kiev  through 
the  dusty  twilight,  in  the  crowded  little  dummy- 
engine  tram,  we  would  recall  such  cases.  To-mor- 
row, first  thing,  we  must  hunt  up  that  man,  but 
next  day  he  would  be  gone. 

Once,  in  the  line,  came  a  peasant  boy  asking 
what  was  given  for  ten  kronen  in  gold.  Four  rubles 
fifty.  He  stood  for  a  long  time  thinking.  Others 
pushed  by  him  and  changed  their  bills,  and  at  last 
he  reached  down  in  his  pocket  and  pulled  out  a  wad 
of  paper,  many  times  folded.  In  this  was  a  gold 
piece — one  could  imagine  that  his  mother  had 
given  it  to  him  when  he  went  away  to  war,  and  told 
him  to  keep  it  for  some  such  time  as  this — until 
the  very  last.  Very  slowly  he  pushed  it  out,  to- 
gether with  fifty  kopecks  borrowed  from  a  comrade 
to  make  the  change,  took  the  five-ruble  bit  of  Rus- 
sian paper,  turned  it  over  and  over,  folded  it  care- 

145 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

fully,  and  pushed  it  down  into  his  pocket,  looking 
as  if  he  had  lost  his  last  friend. 

The  Austrian  soldiers'  caps  were  stuck  full  of 
pins  from  their  various  campaigns.  There  was 
"Balkan  Armee/'  "Izonzo  Armee,^'  "Goit  Schiitze 
TiroV  (God  protect  the  Tyrol),  and  so  on.  And 
there  was  a  curious  irony  in  these  labels — these 
little  symbols  for  which  bands  had  played  and 
great  guns  roared,  and  for  which,  like  marionettes, 
they  had  been  ready  to  march,  shoot,  charge,  suffer, 
and  die. 

One  afternoon  there  was  nearly  the  whole  of  a 
division  staff — slim,  courtly  gentlemen  with  the 
amiable,  slightly  playful  Austrian  air.  I  had  lunched 
at  staff  headquarters  with  men  just  like  them  on 
the  Bug  and  Zlota-Lipa,  the  year  before.  There 
were  several  young  counts,  graceful,  rather  languid 
youths,  more  at  home  in  drawing-rooms,  one  would 
say,  than  in  trenches.  They  poked  over  the  queer- 
looking  shirts  and  underwear  for  which  Day  had 
contracted  with  a  couple  of  enterprising  young 
Kiev  Jews,  and  counted  out  their  money  with  a 
whimsical  air  of  tourists  buying  curiosities.  One 
heard  English  English,  and  Viennese  German,  and 
now  and  then  a  plaintive  Hungarian  phrase  that 
brought  back  Budapest  and  the  Danube  and  gypsy 
orchestras  playing  in  the  cafds  along  the  river. 

Caught   up    with    them    somehow — for   it    was 

146 


RUSSIA'S    WAR    PRISONERS 

rumored  that  the  Russians  were  not  taking  many- 
German  prisoners — was  a  bronzed,  hawk-eyed  Hon 
of  a  man,  a  middle-aged  Landsturm  man,  with  a 
deep  voice,  a  Munich  German.  His  battahon  had 
been  on  the  French  front,  had  been  rushed  over  to 
support  the  Austrians,  and  had  been  with  them 
only  two  days.  They  scarcely  knew  where  they 
were,  went  into  action  as  soon  as  they  were  de- 
trained, threw  back  three  Russian  attacks,  and 
then,  first  thing  they  knew,  were  taken  in  the  rear 
and  there  were  Russians  all  around  them.  Eight 
hundred  out  of  a  thousand  were  lost,  he  said,  "all 
men  over  forty — ^some  of  them  had  sixteen  children 
at  home.  .  .  ." 

Every  now  and  then  among  the  Austro-Hun- 
garians  a  Jew  bobbed  up — there  was  one  clever, 
pushing  sort  of  fellow.  He  argued  about  the  low 
exchange  we  gave  him,  wanted  to  know  how  he, 
just  out  of  hospital,  and  on  a  diet,  was  going  to 
get  along  on  prison  food.  As  for  being  Austrian, 
he  had  lived  for  eighteen  years  in  Luxemburg,  where 
he  was  a  linen  merchant  and  looked  on  himself  as 
an  internationalist.  "It's  a  pity  about  France, 
but  as  a  democrat  how  can  I  hope  that  these  people 
will  win — what  sort  of  civilization  do  they  bring?" 

As  soon  as  telegrams  were  counted  and  money 
changed,  and  "Herr  Konsul"  started  across  the 
prison-yard,  men  with  every  conceivable  request 

147 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

and  appeal  tried  to  get  a  word  with  him.  They 
would  pop  out  from  behind  trees  or  with  backs 
indifferently  turned  until  he  was  free,  whirl  around, 
whack  their  heels,  and  fling  out  their  story. 

One  man  showed  a  telegram,  months  old,  tattered 
from  being  folded  and  refolded.  It  was  from  his 
wife  and  said  that  money  had  been  sent  to  his  camp 
in  Turkestan.  He  had  been  shifted  while  it  was 
on  the  way — couldn't  something  be  done  about 
it?  Of  course  nothing  could  be  done  about  it — 
or  probably  nothing.  It  might  take  weeks  of  red- 
tape  unwinding  to  get  an  answer  from  the  other 
camp,  and  in  the  meanwhile  he  would  have  been 
shifted  somewhere  else.  Nevertheless,  Day  took 
it  up  as  he  took  up  innumerable  such  things,  jotted 
the  facts  down  in  his  note-book,  and  started  an 
inquiry  going. 

An  officer — as  a  rule,  the  German  officers  looked 
after  their  men  more  carefully  than  the  Austrians 
— came  up  with  a  queer,  dazed  old  fellow  who  had 
been  wounded  and  made  prisoner  early  in  1914, 
and  been  shifted  back  and  forth  across  Russia  ever 
since,  and  begged  us  to  do  something  for  the  armer 
Kerl.  A  shower  of  shrapnel  had  brought  him  down 
during  the  first  Russian  advance:  he  was  blind  in 
one  eye,  one  leg  was  no  use,  there  was  a  piece  out 
of  his  side,  but  he  had  contrived  to  pull  through. 
He  had  been  sent  to  Siberia,  back  here,  and  had 

148 


RUSSIA'S    WAR    PRISONERS 

been  in  the  camp  for  weeks  now,  apparently  for- 
gotten. Did  he  have  a  wife,  friends?  Yes,  he  had 
a  wife,  at  any  rate  he  had  one  in  1914.  Obediently 
he  wrote  a  telegram  to  an  address  which  he  seemed 
almost  to  have  forgotten,  asking  his  wife  to  send 
him  fifteen  rubles.  It  was  on  the  Bug  he  was 
wounded,  he  said,  and  kept  repeating  that,  as  if 
it  somehow  explained  everything. 

One  of  the  barracks — they  were  built  half  below 
ground,  like  greenhouses,  with  sleeping  shelves 
along  each  side  and  a  double-deck  row  in  the  centre 
— ^was  full  of  civiHans.  These  were  men  swept  up 
in  ^/illages  and  faraihouses  between  the  lines — 
people  who  had  tried  to  stick  it  out  even  when  the 
fighting  rolled  over  them.  They  were  suspected, 
generally,  of  some  sort  of  spying.  Without  even 
a  ragged  uniform  to  give  them  standing  in  this 
world  of  soldiers,  they  combined  the  weakness  and 
wretchedness  of  civihans  and  criminals,  and  were 
the  sorriest  of  all  the  prisoners. 

One,  a  cadaverous-looking  fellow,  who  might 
have  been  a  village  schoolmaster,  belonged  in  some 
unpronounceable  place  in  the  Bukowina.  But  it 
was  not  himself  he  pleaded  for — it  was  his  brother. 
They  were  going  to  hang  the  brother.  He  was  in 
prison  back  there,  in  that  outlandish,  far-off  vil- 
lage, and  unless  we  could  do  something  they  cer- 
tainly— and  he  drew  his  finger  with  a  queer  sort 

149 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

of  cluck  across  his  own  scrawny  neck.  And  his 
brother  was  absolutely  innocent — "ganz  unschul- 
dig!''  There  were  witnesses  to  prove  that  he  was 
in  his  house  all  the  time. 

His  voice  rose  almost  to  a  shriek  as  we  started 
away,  for  a  lot  of  use  civilian  outsiders  would  be 
in  a  militaiy  business  like  this.  He  kept  repeating 
his  story  as  if  we  hadn't  heard  it.  Among  all  these 
men,  each  with  his  own  problem  and  tragedy,  that 
was  his,  the  one  important  thing,  to  which  every- 
body must  listen.  Very  likely  they  would  hang  his 
brother:  all  sorts  of  things  happen,  and  happen 
very  quickly  in  war-time — he  might  be  hanged 
already — and  there  was  nothing  one  could  do  but 
shake  one's  head  and  say  it  was  too  bad  and  go  off, 
leaving  him  babbHng  his  ganz  unschuldig — ganz 
unschuldig — and  drawing  his  finger  across  his  neck. 

A  group  of  Hungarian  officers,  dark-eyed  fellows, 
with  quick  movements  and  soft  and  ingratiating 
voices,  saluted  us  at  the  gate.  They  had  received 
no  money  for  four  days.  What,  please,  Mr.  Consul, 
were  they  to  do?  Officei's  were  supposed  to  be  paid 
a  ruble  and  a  half  a  day,  out  of  which  they  took  care 
of  themselves.  When  this  was  held  up  they  had 
nothing  and  were  woree  off,  sometimes,  than  com- 
mon soldiers.  We  went  to  the  office  to  find  out 
the  trouble.  It  seemed  that  the  bookkeeper  was 
away.    But  they  would  get  their  pay  soon — sichas 

150 


RUSSIA'S    WAR    PRISONERS 

(at  once);  zavtra  (to-morrow) — as  they  say  in  Rus- 
sia, just  as  they  say  manana  in  Mexico  or  Spain. 

In  such  cases  and  where  men  were  going  away 
without  money,  the  Y.  M.  C.  A.  man  used  his  judg- 
ment and  gave  outright,  either  from  liis  own  funds 
or  from  those  sent  to  be  thus  administered  by  the 
Austrian  and  German  Governments.  For  the 
record's  sake  each  signed  a  sort  of  I  0  U,  though 
it  was  doubtful  if  such  notes  would  ever  be  collected. 
There  were,  in  any  case,  none  of  those  misgivings 
w^hich  often  cloud  and  compHcate  ordinary  city 
charity.  There  was  nothing  to  investigate.  No 
fault  of  theirs  had  brought  them  here — what  had 
these  men  done  that  they  should  be  going  away  to 
face  tuberculosis  or  typhus  in  some  overcrowded 
camp  or  die  of  pneumonia  and  exposure  in  some 
winter  railroad-gang?  The  telegrams  and  clothes 
and  money  were  services  as  concrete  and  trifling 
as  pulling  out  of  the  water  a  man  who  can't  swim. 

There  was  a  constant  demand  for  books,  espe- 
cially Russian-German  grammars  and  dictionaries. 
Day  cleaned  out  the  Kiev  book-shops  of  dictiona- 
ries; got  all  they  would  send  him  from  Moscow 
and  Petrograd.  Hundreds  wanted  dictionaries  who 
couldn't  get  them.  And  this  sort  of  service,  it 
seemed,  not  only  relieved  discomfort  but  helped 
make  the  world  go  round.  These  men  were  going 
to  learn  the  language  of  their  enemies,  to  talk  with 

151 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

them,  read  their  Hterature,  perhaps,  know  their 
good  sides  as  well  as  that  more  or  less  insane  per- 
version of  their  worst  qualities  which  is  used  to 
drive  civilized  peoples  into  battle. 

There  was  something  fascinating  in  the  idea — 
all  Siberia  a  sort  of  university,  as  indeed  it  is,  and 
as  are  all  prison-camps.  Peasants  are  learning  to 
read  and  write,  learning  carpentry,  weaving,  box- 
making,  gardening,  all  sorts  of  things  that  will  be 
useful  when  they  return  home;  educated  men  ac- 
quiring languages,  and  points  of  view  they  w^ould 
never  otheiivise  have  bothered  with. 

Echoes,  quaint  and  otherwise,  of  this  unexpected 
sort  of  schooling  come  pouring  in  to  the  relief  workers 
from  farthest  Siberia: 

My  books  are  very  imperfect,  and  I  would  read  a  reading 
which  is  full  of  the  lively  language.  I  beg  you  are  so  kind  and 
stand  by  me  wkith  advice.  I  would,  after  the  war  all  the  ex- 
penses  which  it  should,  all  the  troubles  and  things  pay  whith 
pleasure.  At  home  I  arc  rich  but  tJiere  I  am  a  outlawed  power- 
less prisoner.  .  .  . 

I  beg  your  pardon  but  when  you  do  know  how  heavy  is  the 
life  for  a  young  inan,  which  must  sit  in  his  room  nearly  six- 
teen montlis  without  habit  work  (I  am  an  engineer  for  machine) 
you  will  m^  understand.  .  .  . 

At  home  I  am  secretary  of  the  Bohemian  Athletic  Football 
Association  and  have  ahvaijs  interesting  myself  for  the  Amer- 
ican and  English  sportsmans  which  stand  on  the  top  by  all 
nations.  Where  I  could  maintain  a  book  for  Olympic  plays 
at  StockJiolmf  .  .  . 

152 


RUSSIA'S    WAR    PRISONERS 

Stranded  doctors  and  professors  wrote  for  scien- 
tific and  medical  books — "  Repetitorium  der  Physi- 
ologie  (Du  Bois-Reymond),"  "Innere  Krankheiten 
(Malkmus),"  and  so  on.  To  one  such  was  addressed 
another  of  those  lost  letters,  a  letter  from  Vienna, 
enclosing  a  woman's  photograph: 

Ernstl  is  well  and  seems  very  precocious  for  his  age.  He 
wants  to  know  everything,  especially  all  medical  things.  Franzl 
is  very  strong  and  alioays  happy,  and  the  hot  stove  in  his  pic- 
ture hook  will  he  by  no  means  touch.  JVhile  Hilda  always  asks 
the  little  girl  in  the  picture  book  to  stop  crying  and  tells  her 
everything  is  already  all  right — es  ist  schon  gut — God  pro- 
tect you.  .  .  . 

A  German  captain  writing  to  his  "Frau  Pro- 
fessor" in  Konigsberg  asked  that  money  be  sent 
through  the  American  Consul,  Vladivostok,  also 
Pushkin  and  Gogol  in  Russian,  and  "my  glasses, 
No.  11-12,  for  short-sightedness,  with  a  stout  case." 
One  of  the  prisoners  in  the  camp  at  Kiev  was  a 
young  Leipzig  University  professor  who  hoped  we 
might  get  him  an  "Iphigenia"  in  Greek,  to  chew 
on  in  his  exile.  There  were  men  of  every  class,  as 
there  must  be  in  miiversal-service  armies. 

The  village  adjoining  the  prison-camp  was  one 
of  those  collections  of  summer  cottages,  or  dachas, 
common  in  the  neighborhood  of  Russian  cities. 
It  was  not  exactly  like  anything  outside  of  Russia 
— ^big,  loose,  and  comfortable,  haphazard,  and  in- 

153 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

teresting.  You  would  scarcely  know  there  was  a 
village,  so  tliick  were  the  trees.  The  streets  were 
immensely  wide,  and  so  were  the  sidewalks  or 
rather  the  dirt  paths,  and  grass  and  weeds  grew 
on  them  and  in  the  road.  Houses  seemed  to  be 
set  every  which  way,  and  mixed  up  with  flowers, 
vegetable-gardens,  beehives,  into  a  sort  of  domestic 
crazy-quilt.  People  strolled  about  and  now  and 
then  one  caught  sight  of  a  veranda  with  table  set 
and  samovar  steaming  cheerfully.  You  would  meet 
a  couple  of  young  girls  in  bright,  peasant  costumes, 
or  boys  in  belted  Russian  blouses,  or  some  pretty 
matron,  an  officer's  wife,  with  one  of  those  fringed 
white  shawls  splashed  with  red  and  green  flowers 
and  leaves,  flung  across  one  shoulder  and  round 
the  hips. 

We  dropped  in  for  tea  with  a  lady  whose  husband 
was  an  engineer  and  had  had  something  to  do  with 
laying  out  the  prison-camp.  Their  own  tea  was 
over;  nothing,  however,  would  do  but  we  must 
wait  till  she  made  some  more.  In  a  moment  the 
samovar  was  steaming  again.  There  was  cold 
chicken,  cucumbers  fresh  from  the  garden,  a  great 
chunk  of  what  looked  like  wild  honey,  cheriy  tarts, 
and  a  big,  brown  jar  of  milk.  Russians  do  not 
tremble  at  mixing  milk  and  cucumbers.  Her  chil- 
dren always  did,  our  hostess  said,  and,  of  course,  cu- 
cumbers and  sour  cream  is  a  common  Russian  dish. 

154 


RUSSIA'S    WAR    PRISONERS 

She  was  a  dark,  lithe,  vivacious  woman,  and 
rattled  away  in  Russian  and  French,  begging  us 
to  take  more  of  eveiything.  It  was  a  pity,  she  said, 
that  women  did  not  have  more  to  do  with  the  govern- 
ment in  Russia,  for  the  Russian  women  had  more 
sense  of  order  and  organization  than  had  the  men. 

Two  dachshunds  pattered  about  the  porch,  and 
I  ventured  some  vapid  jest  about  their  German 
ancestiy  and  asked  if  she  was  not  afraid  they  were 
spies. 

She  responded  quite  seriously:  "No,  I  am  not 
afraid.  We  are  not  much  interested  in  pohtics. 
This  war  is  all  a  great  blunder.  I  do  not  hate  nor 
fear  these  men,  who  are  men  like  our  own,  and  I 
keep  thinking  that  over  there  in  Germany  are 
women  just  like  ourselves  who  are  worrying  about 
them." 

And  this  belief  she  showed  in  practical  form 
eveiy  day.  Her  pleasant  veranda  was  a  sort  of 
open  house  for  the  officer  prisoners  permitted  to 
walk  about  the  village,  and  two  languid  young 
Austrian  counts  who  asked  me  when  peace  was 
coming  and  how  they  could  ever  possibly  endure 
Russia  for  a  year,  and  showed  generally  altogether 
too  Httle  appreciation  of  their  good  fortune,  were 
lounging  on  the  porch  when  we  arrived.  A  doctor 
prisoner  who  helped  in  the  prison  hospital  was  tak- 
ing his  evening  constitutional  in  the  village  street, 

155 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

an  Austrian  painter  in  civilian  clothes  was  dashing 
about — he  had  many  commissions  for  portraits — 
as  if  he  owned  the  place,  and  some  of  the  soldier 
prisoners  were  walking  with  the  Russian  peasant 
girls. 

Anything  more  free  and  easy  than  that  village 
you  could  scarce  imagine,  and  it  was  thoroughly 
characteristic  of  Russia  that  the  winter  before  the 
barracks  had  not  been  finished  in  time;  a  transport 
of  prisoners  came  in  from  the  front  in  the  evening, 
the  men  dropped  down,  worn  out,  on  the  ground, 
with  only  their  overcoats  to  cover  them,  and  in 
the  morning  four  were  frozen  to  death. 

So  things  happen  in  Russia — to  prisoners  and  to 
their  own  people — not  because  any  one  wills  it  nor 
because  they  are  cruel,  but  because  of  indifference 
to  material  things,  because  "of  our  fatal  tendency 
to  delays,  to  take  measures  in  time."  Habits  can- 
not be  made  over  in  a  day  merely  because  there  are 
hundreds  of  thousands  of  war  prisoners  to  take 
care  of.  They  do  as  they  are  used  to  do — what  is 
customary  among  a  people,  only  a  small  minority 
of  whom  have  our  ideas  of  sanitation,  fresh  air, 
and  cleanliness,  whose  organization  is  so  incom- 
plete that  bread  will  be  scarce  in  Moscow,  as  it 
was  now  and  then,  although  one  of  the  things  Rus- 
sia is  jBghting  for  is  an  open  port  on  the  south  from 
which  to  export  her  wheat. 

156 


RUSSIA'S    WAR    PRISONERS 

Sanitary  conditions  in  some  prison-camps  have 
been  bad,  prisoners  have  died  from  exposure  while 
working  on  the  railroad  to  the  White  Sea.  On  the 
other  hand,  one  found  conditions  like  those  in  this 
pleasant  village,  and  I  have  seen  photographs 
taken  by  Y.  M.  C.  A.  workers  in  some  of  the  Siberian 
camps  where  husky  Germans  and  Austrians  were 
playing  tennis,  and  standing  on  each  other's  shoul- 
ders in  athletic  pyramids,  apparently  in  the  pink 
of  condition. 

In  one  camp,  the  prisoners,  as  they  often  do, 
had  organized  a  band.  There  are  accomplished 
artists  of  all  sorts  in  these  cross-sections  of  civilized 
Europe — ^it  is  only  luck  that  Fritz  Kreisler,  instead 
of  returning  to  give  concerts  in  this  country,  after 
his  four  weeks  in  the  trenches,  wasn't  captm-ed  and 
buried  m  one  of  these  Siberian  camps.  It  was  a 
great  thing  for  the  players,  for  the  other  prisonei*s, 
and  even  for  the  authorities  themselves,  for  it  made 
men  forget  conditions  about  which  they  might 
othei^wise  have  complained.  The  amount  of  all- 
round  good  such  an  orchestra  can  do  in  a  prison- 
camp  can  scarcely  be  exaggerated. 

All  went  swimmingly  imtil  suddenly  came  one 
of  those  mysterious  orders,  one  of  those  little  shivers 
of  distrust  and  reaction  which  peiiodically  sweep 
across  the  Russian  official  mind.  The  concerts 
were  forbidden,  the  band  broken  up,  not  allowed 

157 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

to  practise.  Why?  Because  it  was  a  bad  thing 
for  the  morale  of  the  Russian  soldiers  at  the  front 
if  they  got  the  idea  that  prisoners  were  better  off 
than  they  were ! 

This  sort  of  stupidity  must  be  expected  now 
and  then,  as  the  inevitable  reaction  of  a  certain 
type  of  militaristic  or  bureaucratic  mind.  Inevitable, 
too,  where  the  habit  of  distrusting  popular  initiative 
is  ingrained,  was  the  more  or  less  constant  suspicion, 
on  the  part  of  the  authorities,  of  even  the  most  un- 
selfish efforts  to  help.  There  is  no  need  of  accent- 
ing these  things.  They  and  their  results  are  a  side 
of  Russian  life  which  has  always  been  exploited  in 
the  west.  A  more  sensible  attitude  is  that  taken 
by  one  of  the  neutral  relief  workers,  who  said,  in 
a  report  I  happened  to  read,  that  he  had  almost 
invariably  found  people  ready  to  co-operate  with 
him  both  in  Russia  and  in  Germany,  and  that  it 
had  proved  much  more  useful  to  call  attention  to 
the  good  things  in  each  place,  rather  than  to  add 
to  the  existing  supply  of  hatred  by  attempting  to 
ex-ploit  ciiielties  or  mistakes.  You  could  get  much 
more  out  of  one  side  by  telling  them  how  good  they 
were  or  how  well  their  own  men  were  treated  by 
the  other  people,  than  by  starting  in  by  asserting 
that  they  must  reform. 

So  far  as  Russian  officials  were  concerned  this  atti- 
tude was  pai-ticularly  sensible  and  true.    "Scratch  a 

158 


RUSSIA'S    WAR    PRISONERS 

Russian  and  you  find  a  Tartar,"  and  many  outsiders 
appeared  so  fascinated  by  this  somewhat  threadbare 
observation  that  they  started  in  scratching  at  once. 
The  officials  were  used  to  it,  promptly  drew  in  their 
heads  like  turtles,  and  there  was  no  doing  anything 
with  them.  They  could  not  be  driven,  but  they 
would  do  a  great  deal  for  people  they  liked.  One 
generahzation  outsidei-s  might  well  have  kept  in 
mind,  both  in  passing  judgment  and  in  attempting 
to  improve  conditions — nothing  was  being  done  to 
prisoners  of  war  to  which  Russians  had  not  long 
been  accustomed  in  handling  similar  masses  of  their 
own  people. 


159 


VII 

A  RUSSIAN  COTTON  KING 

The  American  cotton  king  of  whom  we  read  now 
and  then  in  the  papers  is  generally  a  speculator, 
with  a  down-town  office  like  any  other  broker,  and 
his  visible  kingdom  consists  of  a  roll-top  desk,  a 
stenographer,  and  a  spool  of  ticker  tape.  There 
are  cotton  kings  in  Russia,  too,  but  they  are  quite 
different.  They  are  mill  owners,  and  little  kings, 
in  fact,  and  rule  in  paternal  fashion,  not  only  over 
their  business,  but  over  the  lives  of  the  thousands 
who  work  for  them. 

The  Russian,  or,  at  any  rate,  the  particular  manu- 
facturer I  have  in  mind,  does  not  lock  his  office  door 
at  night  and  roll  off  in  his  limousine  to  another 
world.  He  puts  his  mill  away  off  in  the  country 
somewhere,  builds  up  a  community  around  it,  and 
lives  there  with  his  work-people  veiy  much  as  a  man 
lives  on  a  big  plantation.  He  provides  houses  for 
them,  schools,  and  hospitals;  he  sees  them  into  the 
world  and  out  of  it,  and  looks  after  nearly  every 
detail  of  their  lives,  from  their  religion  to  their 
amusements,  on  the  way.    Modem  machineiy  and 

IGO 


A    RUSSIAN    COTTON    KING 

feudalism — or,  at  least,  some  of  its  surviving  habits — 
meet,  in  short,  in  such  a  mill,  and  the  owner's 
comitiy  house,  although  it  was  built  only  yester- 
day and  looks  exactly  like  the  countiy  home  of 
any  American  millionaii'e,  is  really,  in  its  relation 
to  his  retainers,  an  old-fashioned  baronial  castle. 

There  are  several  of  these  big  cotton-mill  com- 
mimities  in  Russia.  Mr.  Alexander  Konovaloff, 
Minister  of  Transportation  in  the  new  government, 
is  the  third  generation  of  a  family  of  cotton  weav- 
ers. His  mills  are  on  the  Volga,  near  Yaroslav. 
There  are  a  nimiber  of  cotton-mills  near  Moscow, 
which  is  one  of  the  manufacturing  centres  of  Rus- 
sia, and  several  belong  to  various  branches  of  the 
Morosoff  family.  The  miUs  which  I  visited  were 
those  near  the  village  of  Bogorodsk,  about  an  hour 
and  a  half  out  of  Moscow  on  the  Nizhni  Novgorod 
road. 

It  was  in  New  York  that  I  happened  to  meet 
one  of  the  brothers  who,  with  their  father,  conduct 
these  Bogorodsk  mills.  He  was  not  grinding  an 
unlighted  cigar  between  his  teeth — ^the  indispensable 
mark,  as  the  American  stage-manager  teaches  us, 
of  the  captain  of  industiy — ^nor  did  he  talk  in  tele- 
graphic sentences,  and  there  was  nothing  to  indi- 
cate that  this  imassuming  gentleman  was  accus- 
tomed, back  in  Russia,  to  having  twelve  thousand 
people  take  off  their  hats  to  him.     Quite  mildly, 

161 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

indeed,  in  a  hullabaloo  of  clacking  typewriters,  he 
stopped  me  as  I  was  leaving  another  man's  office, 
wrote  a  line  on  his  card,  and  hoped  that  if  ever  I 
got  to  Moscow  I'd  give  it  to  his  cousin  there. 

This  cousin  I  found  several  months  later  in  a 
big,  quiet  office  in  the  merchant  quarter  of  Moscow, 
a  very  busy  but  amiable  young  man,  trying  to  at- 
tend to  his  cotton  business  and  at  the  same  time 
take  care  of  all  the  committees,  conferences,  and  so 
on,  into  which  any  such  man  of  affairs  is  likely  to 
be  drawn  in  war-time — especially,  perhaps,  in 
Moscow,  where  people  belong  and  have  roots,  and 
everybody,  so  to  speak,  knows  everybody  else. 

He  found  time,  however,  to  telephone  out  to 
Bogorodsk,  and  next  day  two  boys,  one  the  son  of 
the  Morosoff  I  had  seen  in  New  York,  came  in  to 
escort  me  to  the  mill.  Both  were  still  in  school, 
they  spoke  French  and  a  little  English,  and  the 
younger  wore  the  blouse  and  military  belt  and  cap 
of  the  Russian  schoolboy.  He  carried  a  tennis- 
racket,  and  wanted  to  know  right  away  if  I  played 
and  whether  American  football  was  more  like  Asso- 
ciation or  Rugby.  They  took  me  to  the  station  in 
the  cousin's  automobile,  got  a  ticket  for  me  and 
tea,  pointed  out  the  dachas,  or  summer  cottages,  on 
the  way  to  Bogorodsk,  the  Austrian  prisoners  work- 
ing along  the  road,  the  new  cable-line  that  was  to 
bring  electric  power  to  the  mills — in  short,  were 

162 


The  owner's  house — only  a  stone's  throw  from  the  uiill. 


A  family  group  at  the  foot  of  the  garden  behind  the  house. 


A    RUSSIAN    COTTON    KING 

just  like  any  well-mannered,  wide-awake,  hospitable 
preparatoiy-school  boys  at  home. 

For  an  horn*  and  a  half  we  rode  away  from  the 
surroundings  in  which  one  generally  finds  mills  in 
America,  alighted  at  a  village  with  wide,  unpaved 
streets,  and  houses  made  of  planed  logs,  and  drove 
three  or  four  versts  farther.  Here,  by  a  little  river, 
on  ground  formerly  covered  by  pine-woods,  were 
mills,  cottages,  dormitories,  school,  hospital,  theatre, 
park — a  little  city,  in  fact. 

The  brother  received  me,  and  in  businesslike 
fashion  said  that,  as  I  had  but  two  days  and  there 
was  much  to  see,  we  had  best  set  out  at  once.  He 
showed  me  a  map  of  the  works,  and  then  took  me 
to  a  Httle  old-fashioned  room,  in  a  low,  old-fashioned 
pai-t  of  the  factory,  to  meet  his  father. 

The  elder  Morosoff  spoke  some  English,  but  held 
more  fimily  to  the  habits  of  an  earlier  generation 
than  his  sons.  He  wore  his  Russian  boots  outside 
his  trousers,  a  long  coat  and  longish  hair;  he  went 
to  bed  at  nine  eveiy  night  and  got  up  at  five  for  a 
bath  in  the  river.  He  never  spent  a  night  away 
from  the  mills,  and,  though  he  occasionally  could  be 
lured  to  Moscow,  he  always  came  back  to  his  own 
bed  in  the  country.  Like  most  of  the  Morosoffs, 
he  was  an  "Old  Believer" — a  sect  which  has  en- 
dured persecution  and  stubbornly  held  itself  apart 
from  the  main  body  of  the  Russian  church  for  dif- 

163 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

ferences — whether  the  priest  shall  bless  with  two 
fingers  or  three,  for  instance — ^which  seem  compara- 
tively unimportant  to  outsiders — in  short,  just  such 
a  canny,  hard-headed  old  gentleman  as  a  play- 
wright of  the  Manchester  school  would  create  to 
represent  the  older  generation  in  a  long  line  of  mill 
owners.  Between  him  and  the  young  gentleman 
who  had  come  out  with  me  there  were  much  the 
same  differences  that  one  so  often  sees  in  our 
own  country  between  pioneers  and  their  grand- 
children. 

We  walked  out  past  a  long  line  of  women  and 
children  waiting  with  baskets  outside  the  com- 
pany's store,  just  as  people  waited  then  in  Petro- 
grad  for  sugar.  They  were  not  compelled  to  buy 
here,  Mr.  Morosoff  said,  but  the  company  had  laid 
in  big  suppHes,  still  kept  to  peace  prices,  and  they 
could  do  better  here  than  in  the  village.  Then  we 
entered  a  cottage-office,  where,  round  a  horseshoe- 
shaped  table,  sat  a  sort  of  council  of  village  elders. 
These  wise  men  were  all  employees,  some  had 
worked  up  from  the  bottom,  each  represented  some 
department  of  the  factory,  and  it  was  their  duty  to 
pass  on  the  various  applications  for  work,  change 
of  quarters,  and  so  on. 

When  an  employee  wanted  anything — a  house  of 
his  own,  for  instance — he  filled  out  a  long  paper 
form  which  was  passed  in  to  this  council,  and  they 

164 


A    RUSSIAN    COTTON    KING 

decided  what  the  company  could  do  for  him.  They 
were  going  over  these  appHcations,  discussing, 
stamping,  and  signing  them  as  we  looked  in.  This 
council,  Mr.  Morosoff  said,  was  the  backbone  of 
the  community's  government.  But,  in  addition, 
the  father  and  son  had  certain  hours  when  any 
workman  might  personally  consult  them. 

The  wise  men  rose  and  bowed  gravely  as  we 
looked  in,  and  then,  after  we  had  glanced  at  sev- 
eral hospital  buildings,  including  a  lying-in  hos- 
pital, we  went  through  some  of  the  workmen's 
barracks.  Not  all  the  twelve  thousand  work-people 
lived  in  these.  A  few  came  every  day  from  the 
village.  Heads  of  departments  had  their  own 
houses,  on  company  property,  resembling  the  usual 
comfortable  commuter's  house  in  a  New  York 
suburb,  and  the  more  skilful  or  dependable  work- 
men also  lived  in  separate  cottages  which  the  com- 
pany had  helped  them  acquire. 

The  dormitories  were  big  barracks  of  three  or 
four  stories,  with  iron  stairways,  stone  floors,  and 
apartments  of  from  one  to  three  rooms,  opening 
off  a  corridor  which  ran  the  length  of  the  building. 
Most  of  these  apartments  were  occupied  by  families, 
each  of  which  had  a  little  shed  in  the  yard  and  also 
space  in  a  loft  for  its  big  wooden  chest  and  other 
hea\y  things.  Cooking  and  washing  were  done  in 
common  rooms,  and  in  the  kitchen  were  a  dozen 

165 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

or  so  of  the  flues  with  which  the  charcoal  fire  is 
started  in  the  samovar. 

We  looked  into  a  number  of  these  miniature 
homes.  There  was  always  a  bed  piled  with  an  in- 
credible number  of  pillows — for  the  Russian  peasant 
prefers,  for  some  reason,  to  sleep  half  sitting  up — 
and  generally  a  baby's  cradle  hanging  on  a  cord 
like  a  bird-cage.  The  rooms  were  light,  clean  ac- 
cording to  the  somewhat  easy-going  Russian  stand- 
ards; there  were  flowers  in  most  of  the  windows,  and 
they  compared  favorably,  at  least,  with  the  city 
tenements  used  by  the  same  class  of  workers  at 
home. 

These  people  had,  however,  this  advantage — 
they  were  in  the  countiy  already,  and  two  minutes' 
walk  from  their  somewhat  stuffy  apartments  took 
them  to  the  middle  of  a  pine  forest.  We  took  a 
turn  through  these  woods,  tunnelled  with  dark,  rest- 
ful allees.  A  few  mothers  and  children  were  walk- 
ing there  then,  and  on  Sundays,  one  fancied,  it 
must  have  been  full.  I  asked  what  the  people  did 
to  amuse  themselves  away  off  here  in  the  country. 

There  was  a  theatre,  Mr.  Morosoff  said,  where 
they  had  movie  pictures  and  occasionally  a  com- 
pany down  from  Moscow — ^for  this  latter,  a  nom- 
inal admission  fee  was  charged — there  were  the 
river  and  woods,  and  then  they  had  an  amuse- 
ment park  of  their  own.     We  walked  down  to  it 

166 


A    RUSSIAN    COTTON    KING 

through  the  pines — a  football-field,  bicycle-track, 
outdoor  movie  theatre,  bath-house,  dancing  and 
refreshment  pavilion,  and  so  on.  Most  of  the 
younger  men  had  gone  off  to  fight,  so  that  things 
were  quieter  here  on  holida3^s  now  than  usual,  but 
even  in  peace  times,  Mr.  Morosoff  said,  it  was 
rather  slow  work  getting  the  people  interested  in 
games.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  Russians  have 
comparatively  little  "sporting"  spirit,  in  the  Amer- 
ican or  English  sense  of  the  word.  They  are  in- 
tensely fond  of  the  comitiy,  of  singing,  dancing, 
drinking,  and  Just  loafing  about  in  the  sun,  but 
athletics  for  their  own  sake,  or  the  kind  of  concen- 
trated effort  required  for  any  sort  of  fast,  competi- 
tive game,  seems  rather  foreign  to  their  tempera- 
ment. 

Everywhere  we  went,  and  later  in  the  mills, 
gatemen  and  workmen  generally  took  off  their 
hats  and  bowed  in  the  grave  fashion  with  which 
the  Russian  peasant  is  accustomed  to  salute  his 
social  superiors.  Some  of  the  older  men  bowed 
with  a  regular  old  hoyar  gesture,  but  there  was 
neither  servility  on  one  side  nor  stony  aloofness 
on  the  other.  The  salutes  were  made  with  much 
gravity  and  dignity,  the  proprietor  always  lifting 
his  own  hat  in  reply,  and  one  felt  again  that  essen- 
tially simple  and  friendly  relationship  so  often  seen 
between  different  classes  in  Russia. 

167 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

It  was  dark,  and  the  mills  were  all  ablaze  as  we 
entered  and  began  to  follow  up  the  complicated 
and  fascinating  process  of  cotton  weaving  from  the 
fii'st  shaking  up  of  the  rough  bales  from  Egypt, 
America,  and  Turkestan — ablaze  with  lights  and 
with  magic:  the  magic  which  fascinates  almost 
any  unthinking  inhabitant  of  this  twentieth  cen- 
tury when  he  sees  machinery  making  things  whose 
existence,  ready-made,  he  has  always  taken  for 
granted. 

It  seemed  that  almost  as  many  things  are  made 
out  of  cotton  as  of  coal-tar.  White  cloth  and  prints 
are  only  the  beginning.  There  was  khaki  and  can- 
vas for  tents,  fine  shirtings  and  crepe  de  chine, 
thick  drab  blankets  for  the  army,  corduroys  and 
luxurious-looking  red  and  blue  velvet.  It  ought 
not  to  surprise  one,  perhaps,  that  merely  by  clip- 
ping the  upper  layer  of  thread  in  an  ordinary  piece 
of  cotton  cloth,  you  can  turn  it  into  soft,  luminous 
velvet,  but  it  surprised  me,  nevertheless. 

The  cloth  was  stretched  like  a  diTmihead  upon 
a  frame  across  the  room,  a  barefooted  peasant 
woman  inserted  a  needle-like  knife-blade  under  the 
thread,  and  so  went  trotting  across  the  room, 
ripping  as  she  went.  Then  she  put  the  needle  in 
again  and  trotted  back.  She  walked  about  twenty 
kilometres  a  day,  the  superintendent  said.  It 
seemed  slow  and  laborious,  but  the  women  looked 

168 


A    RUSSIAN    COTTON    KING 

well  and  contented,  and  their  work  was  certainly 
peaceful  enough  after  the  nerve-racldng  clatter  of 
the  spinning  and  weaving  rooms.  The  corduroys 
were  made  by  machinery. 

Most  of  the  machines — and  this  represents 
another  liabihty  for  the  Russian  manufacturer — 
came  from  England.  Some  were  French,  some 
German,  and  some  made  in  Russia,  but  I  did  not 
happen  to  see  any  from  America.  This,  in  addition 
to  the  care  they  have  to  take  of  their  employees, 
is  another  reason  why  twice  as  much  initial  capital 
is  needed  to  start  such  a  business  in  Russia  as  in 
England. 

In  the  velvet  department  we  ran  across  an  Eng- 
lishman, a  Lancashire  man;  and  the  manager  of 
the  mills,  or  at  least  of  the  spinning  section,  a  pleas- 
ant-mannered Russian,  also  spoke  English  and  had 
spent  some  time  in  England.  He  joined  us  for 
dinner,  and,  as  we  walked  over  toward  the  house, 
asked  about  labor  unions  and  other  things  in 
America.  The  position  of  negroes  seemed  to  inter- 
est him  particularly.  "Are  they  Christians?"  he 
asked. 

From  the  endless  clatter  and  dusty  air  of  the 
mills  we  stepped  out  mto  the  cool  dark,  walked  a 
couple  of  hundred  yards,  turned  into  a  gateway 
where  a  dvornik  gravely  saluted,  and  were,  all  at 
once,  in  another  world.     A  curved  driveway  led 

169 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

through  shrubs  and  flower-beds  to  a  long,  low,  half- 
timbered  country  house  which  might  have  been 
lifted  over  from  Long  Island  or  Westchester.  A 
big  St.  Bernard  came  galloping  and  barking  out  to 
meet  us.  The  door  was  opened  by  a  trim  maid 
in  black  and  white,  and  we  stood  in  a  wainscoted 
hall  with  the  glimpses  of  rugs  and  paintings,  the 
same  air  of  ease  and  ordered  comfort  that  one  ex- 
pects in  such  a  country  house  at  home. 

A.  jolly  little  brother  of  the  boys  who  had  come 
down  with  me  on  the  train  soon  appeared — ^he  also 
spoke  French,  and  wore  now  a  belted  Russian 
blouse  and,  when  he  went  outdoors,  one  of  those 
long,  gray  military  overcoats  in  which  the  tiniest  of 
Russian  schoolboys  look  like  field-marshals.  Then 
there  was  a  still  littler  sister  with  tremendously 
bright,  slightly  upslanting  eyes,  and  another  older 
sister  with  blond  braids  wound  tightly  round  her 
head  and  the  shy  but  distinguished  air  of  a  Httle 
princess.  All  of  the  young  people  bowed  to  the 
ikon  in  the  corner  and  crossed  themselves  in  the 
wide  Russian  fashion  before  they  sat  down  to  dinner, 
and  as  we  rose  from  the  table  they  turned  gravely, 
bowed,  and  crossed  themselves  again  before  leav- 
ing the  room. 

The  grandfather,  who  lived  in  another  house, 
dropped  in  as  we  were  finishing  dinner  to  chat  for 
a  few  moments  before  going  to  his  Spartan  slum- 

170 


Two  of  the  dormitories  used  by  workmen  and  their  families. 


View  from  the  owner's  house — one  of  the  mills  in  the  distance. 


A    RUSSIAN    COTTON    KING 

ber.  We  smoked  and  talked,  went  to  another  room 
presently,  where  a  table  was  set  with  a  steaming 
samovar,  fruit  and  preserves  and  cake — for  no  Rus- 
sian evening  is  complete  without  tea — and  then  at 
ten  o'clock  went  to  see  the  lights  go  out  in  the 
mills  and  the  work-people  come  pouring  into  the 
street.  Work  began  at  four  in  the  morning  and 
stopped  at  ten  at  night,  and  the  shifts  were  so  ar- 
ranged that  each  worked,  on  the  average,  a  nine- 
hour  day. 

I  pulled  aside  the  portieres  next  morning  to  find 
the  windows  opening  on  a  view  of  lawn  and  river, 
which  at  home  you  would  generally  have  to  go 
hours  away  from  factories  to  see,  and  it  was 
characteristic  that,  beyond  the  woods  across  the 
river,  projected  the  end  of  one  of  the  weaving  mills. 
All  day  we  tramped  up  and  down  iron  stairways, 
from  the  undergi'ound  tunnels  where  the  dusty  air 
was  pumped  out  and  thrown  away  altogether,  or 
washed  with  sprays  and  sent  back  again,  up  to 
the  packing-rooms  where  girls  were  engaged  in  the 
comparatively  elegant  task  of  tjdng  ribbons  round 
packages  of  handkerchiefs  or  pasting  labels  on 
bolts  of  spotless  white  cloth.  They  were  the  mill's 
aristocracy  and  had  time  and  the  mood  for  smiles 
as  we  went  through. 

We  saw  machine-shops,  where — another  glimpse 
of  the  War  Industrial  Committee — they  were  mak- 

171 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

ing  shells  for  the  army,  and  a  particularly  interest- 
ing school.  There  were  rooms  for  kindergartens, 
clay  modelling,  and  manual  training,  a  well-equipped 
physics  laboratory,  and  a  large  garden  where  each 
pupil  had  a  bit  of  ground  in  which  to  raise  vege- 
tables. 

In  one  room  were  a  lot  of  big  mounted  prints, 
copies  of  more  or  less  well-laiown  paintings,  illus- 
tratmg  different  epochs  of  Russia's  history.  Rus- 
sian artists  have  done  a  good  deal  of  this  kind  of 
work,  paintings  which  combine  lively  picturcsque- 
ness  with  accurate  study  of  costumes  and  customs 
— ^what  Frederic  Remington  did  for  our  West. 
These  prints  were  mounted  on  hea^7■  pasteboard 
to  stand  rough  handling.  They  covered  the  whole 
of  Russian  histoiy  through  the  various  migrations 
and  invasions  and  would  have  been  interesting  to 
anybody.  Possibly  we  have  such  pictures  in  our 
own  schools;  at  any  rate,  they  were  characteristic 
of  the  tactful  care  with  which  throughout  these 
employers  seemed  to  be  looking  out  for  the  interest 
of  their  employees. 

The  worlvman's  side  of  life  in  such  a  community 
— they  have  had  their  strikes  here — could  scarcely 
be  more  than  touched  on  in  such  a  ghmpse.  What 
was  most  interesting  to  an  American  was  the  variety 
and  solidity  of  such  a  life  from  the  employer's  point 
of  view,  as  compared  with,  that  of  most  manufac- 

172 


A    RUSSIAN    COTTON    KING 

turers  at  home,  though  I  beheve  there  is  at  least 
one  somewhat  similar  cotton-milling  community  in 
New  England.  Here  was  not  merely  a  money- 
making  business,  but  a  career  in  the  fullest  sense 
of  the  word,  combining  half  a  dozen  different  avo- 
cations with  the  main  business  of  cotton-making, 
and  not  only  linking  a  man  with  the  outside  world, 
but  rooting  him  in  his  own  soil  as  w^ell.  Sanita- 
tion, housing,  schools,  amusements — all  the  things 
that  social  workers  experiment  with  in  a  more  or 
less  detached  fashion — were  part  of  this  proprietor's 
daily  work.  He  had  his  "souls,"  as  they  used  to 
say  in  Russia,  in  the  serf  days — souls  for  whom  he 
was  as  directly  responsible  to  his  own  conscience 
as  he  was  to  his  customers  for  his  cotton. 


173 


VIII 

DOWN  THE  VOLGA  TO  ASTRAKHAN 

One  of  the  best  things  about  the  Volga  is  that  it 
takes  you  away  from  Petrograd — away,  that  is  to 
say,  from  this  chilly  "window  on  Europe,"  and 
down  into  the  real  Russia,  which  sprawls  on  the 
plain  looking  toward  Asia  and  the  sun.  The  Volga 
flows  down  through  the  heart  of  Russia  as  the 
Mississippi  flows  through  the  heart  of  the  United 
States.  It  starts  in  the  north,  not  far  from  Petro- 
grad, and  twists  south  westward  through  nine  "gov- 
ernments," until,  just  across  from  Persia,  it  spreads 
through  two  hundred  mouths,  into  the  Caspian 
Sea.  It  is  much  the  longest  river  in  Europe,  nearly 
as  long  as  the  Mississippi.  On  it  and  its  branches 
most  of  Russian  histoiy  is  hung,  and  with  the  canal, 
which  connects  the  upper  waters  with  the  Neva, 
and  so  with  Petrograd  and  the  Baltic,  it  cuts  a 
flowing  road  clear  across  Russia  from  Asia  to  the 
west. 

The  distance  is  twenty-three  hundred  miles  as 
the  river  runs,  and  all  these  miles  are  taking  one 
away  from  the  black  coats  and  bureaucrats  of  the 
capital  and  into  the  countiy — down  into  the  great 

174 


DOWN    THE    VOLGA 

Russian  plairi;  with  its  white  birches  and  wheat- 
fields  and  gilt  and  sky-blue  domes,  like  little  up- 
turned beets;  and  down  through  the  Russian  people, 
fine  folks  and  lousy  peasants,  Great  Russians,  Little 
Russians,  Tatars,  Kalmucks,  Kirghiz,  and  the  rest 
— "my  strange,  sweet,  nasty,  precious  country," 
as  one  of  Turgenev's  characters  said. 

A  good  many  Americans  will  remember  the 
Volga  boat-song  which  a  Russian  balalaika  orchestra 
played  here  a  few  years  ago — wide,  slow-sweeping, 
minor  chords,  half  dirge,  half  sailor's  chantey, 
through  whose  rhythmic  strumming  one  was  sup- 
posed to  see  a  shaggy  gang — ^like  the  boatmen  in 
Riepen's  picture — come  out  of  the  distance,  drag- 
ging their  barge,  pass  by  and  disappear  again  in 
the  endless  stretches  of  the  river. 

The  picture  which  this  called  up  was  true  of  the 
old-time  Volga,  when  thousands  of  such  hurlaki, 
sodden,  shaggy  beasts  of  burden,  like  the  human 
driftwood  in  Gorky's  "Lower  Depths,"  did  the 
Volga  hauling.  There  are  still  some  of  these  boat- 
men, but  the  Volga  of  to-day,  particularly  that 
war-time  summer  river,  was  quite  another  matter. 
Except  for  the  immense  log  rafts,  diifting  down 
from  the  northern  forests  to  the  treeless  provinces 
of  Saratov,  Samara,  and  Astrakhan,  most  of  the 
traffic  was  in  oil-burning  steamers  or  big  steel  light- 
ers pushed  by  tugs.    And  the  Volga  was  popular 

175 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

and  even  rather  fashionable.  People  use  the  river 
as  they  used  to  use  the  Mississippi  in  the  good  old 
steamboat  days,  and  the  flat-bottomed  steamers 
are  something  like  Mississippi  River  boats  except 
that  most  of  them  are  oil-biu-ning  wdth  low  stacks. 
And  now  that  war  had  closed  the  way  to  the  Euro- 
pean resortS;  these  floating  hotels,  much  more  clean 
and  comfortable  than  most  hotels  in  Russia,  went 
rolling  down  to  Astrakhan  and  back,  packed  with 
holiday  travellers,  some  going  for  the  trip  itself, 
and  some  to  pick  up  trains  farther  south  for  coun- 
try estates  or  the  summer  resorts  of  the  Caucasus. 

It  was  with  such  a  trainload,  chattering  French, 
English,  and  their  own  language,  carrying  tennis- 
rackets,  cameras,  fishing-tackle,  candy-boxes,  and 
magazines — the  Russian  equivalent  of  the  crowd  at 
the  Grand  Central  taking  the  Adirondack  Express 
— that  I  left  Petrograd  one  June  afternoon  for  Ry- 
binsk, on  the  upper  Volga,  a  night's  journey  from 
the  capital.  In  my  compartment  was  a  sharp- 
faced  young  Jewess,  rather  ill  at  ease,  and  across 
the  way,  and  possibly  one  of  the  causes  of  her  em- 
barrassment, a  tall,  rather  distinguished-looking 
gentleman,  more  English  than  Russian  in  appear- 
ance, and  his  pretty  daughter. 

Both  had  a  rather  uppish,  "society"  air,  they 
talked  French  to  each  other,  and  the  young  lady, 
I  was  presently  interested  to  discover,  was  reading, 

176 


DOWN    THE    VOLGA 

in  English,  Henry  James's  "Washington  Square.'* 
Through  this  we  presently  got  into  conversation 
and  became  forthwith  travelling  companions  for 
the  next  fortnight.  They  were  going  down  to  As- 
trakhan and  back  as  far  as  the  Kama — one  of  the 
Volga's  tributaries  coming  in  from  the  Urals,  and 
more  than  a  thousand  miles  long  itself — and  then 
up  the  Kama  and  back:  more  than  a  month  of 
river  travelling. 

They  were  Polish,  it  appeared  next  morning, 
when  I  asked  if  they  always  talked  French  instead 
of  Russian.  The  father  had  a  big  property  near 
Dvinsk,  where  there  are  many  such  Polish  estates, 
and  a  house  in  Petrograd,  but  in  peace  times  they 
spent  most  of  their  time  in  Paris.  They  spoke 
Russian,  of  course,  and  various  other  languages, 
but  felt  more  at  home  in  French.  The  daughter 
did  not  care  much  for  people  and  preferred  a  novel 
to  most  of  the  river  sights,  but  the  tall  father  liked 
to  talk.  He  was  particularly  interested  that  eve- 
ning in  the  position  of  negroes  in  America — ^whether 
they  voted  or  not,  and  if  they  didn't,  how  Amer- 
icans fitted  that  in  with  their  theories  of  democracy. 

The  yoxmg  Jewess,  who  was  the  daughter  of  the 
fat  lady  with  a  lot  of  baggage  in  the  next  compart- 
ment, had  disappeared  when  bedtime  came,  and 
her  small  brother  had  taken  her  place.  The  Pole 
asked  if  I  objected  to  Jews — "because,"  he  said, 

177 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

raising  his  eyebrows  and  glancing  with  tremendous 
solemnity  at  the  child  in  the  comer,  "you're  going 
to  have  one  over  your  head  to-night !" 

We  slept  comfortably  enough,  without  having 
the  berths  made  up  or  undressing,  although  regular 
Russians  attach  small  importance  to  such  matters, 
and  when  cars  are  crowded,  particularly  second- 
class  carriages,  men  and  women  bunk  quite  com- 
fortably in  the  same  compartment,  just  as  they 
come.  It  was  just  about  coffee  time  when  we  shook 
ourselves  out  of  our  blankets  at  Rybinsk,  where  a 
small  steamer  was  waiting  which  would  connect  with 
the  big  boat  a  day  or  two  lower  down. 

Rybinsk  is  eight  hundred  years  old,  and  its  little 
church  with  gilded  shrines  and  kneeling  peasants 
looked  almost  as  ancient — a  bleak  little  town,  like 
hundreds  of  others,  with  dirty  streets  full  of  peas- 
ants in  sheepskin  coats  and  wrinkled  boots — a 
straggling  line  of  booths  or  shops  along  the  river- 
road,  stocked  with  all  sorts  of  odds  and  ends,  and 
a  pervading  smell  of  dried  fish. 

The  Pole  amiably  helped  me  with  my  ticket,  for 
in  such  places  nothing  but  Russian  is  spoken  gen- 
erally, and  I  dumped  my  luggage  in  a  deck  cabin, 
and,  opening  the  door  to  go  out,  nearly  bumped 
into  a  young  man  in  uniform  coming  in,  who  clicked 
his  spurred  boots  and  saluted.  The  uniform  was 
that  of  the  Corps  des  Pages,  a  school  for  the  sons 

178 


DOWN    THE    VOLGA 

of  generals  and  other  distinguished  persons  in  Petro- 
grad,  and  the  young  man  was  going  to  the  front 
as  an  officer  in  the  autumn.  He  spoke  French  and 
some  English,  bothered  himself  about  my  state- 
room on  the  next  boat,  introduced  me  to  a  Petro- 
grad  family,  friends  of  his,  who  spoke  English — in 
short,  was  as  helpful  and  hospitable  as  young  Rus- 
sians of  his  class  are  likely  to  be. 

It  was  at  the  height  of  the  offensive  in  the  Buko- 
wina,  and  I  asked,  rather  flippantly,  how  long  be- 
fore the  Russians  would  be  in  Vienna. 

"We  shan't  try  to  go  beyond  the  Carpathians," 
he  said  seriously;  "we  shall  make  no  mistakes  this 
time."  He  asked  many  questions  about  our  troubles 
with  Mexico.  "It's  all  a  matter  of  petroleum,'^ 
he  said. 

For  two  days  the  little  steamer  swam  swiftly 
down  through  a  country  washed  bright  with  recent 
rains.  There  were  wheat-fields  and  patches  of 
dark  pines  and  white  birches — the  wistful  white 
lines  against  black  and  bright  green,  characteristic 
of  the  Russian  plain.  There  was  always  a  church 
in  sight,  and  every  bend  brought  a  new  one — a 
white  church  with  its  cluster  of  little  beet-shaped 
domes,  gold,  green,  indigo,  or  sky-blue.  Some  were 
monasteries  set  in  a  thicket  of  dark  pines  and  cedars 
with  a  white  wall  round  the  whole — one  looked 
across  the  water  to  a  band  of  white  shining  above 

179 


WHITE    NTOHTS 

the  low  shore,  above  that  a  dark  belt  of  pines,  and 
then  the  gay  little  domes  rioting  above  the  trees. 

There  was  something  fantastic  m  these  little 
domes — they  were  like  the  decorations  an  Amer- 
ican illustrator  might  put  on  the  margin  of  a  book 
of  faiiy-tales.  They  never  could  have  sprung, 
one  felt,  from  the  same  kind  of  religious  feeling  as 
that  which  raised  the  sharp  ascetic  spires  of  New 
England.  You  could  scarcely  imagine  Emerson 
or  George  Ade  or  President  Wilson  or  Nebraska 
farmers  living  naturally  and  comfortably  with  just 
that  sort  of  architecture.  I  was  reading  the 
"Brothers  Karamazov"  as  we  sailed  past  them, 
and  came  across  that  reply  of  Mitya's  when  he  was 
advised  to  go  to  the  New  World  and  begin  his 
smashed  life  over  again.  "...  I  hate  that  Amer- 
ica. And  though  they  may  be  wonderful  at  ma- 
chinery, damn  them,  they  are  not  of  my  soul.  I 
love  Russia,  Alyosha,  I  love  Russia;  I  love  the  Rus- 
sian God,  though  I  am  a  scoundrel  myself.  I  shall 
choke  there.  ..." 

The  Petrograd  lady,  to  whom  the  cadet  had  in- 
troduced me,  threw  up  her  hands  in  mock  dismay 
at  the  Dostoyevski.  "Those  dreadful  books!" 
They  were  so  wild,  so  nerve-racking — one  couldn't 
stand  Dostoyevski  for  more  than  a  few  minutes  at 
a  time.  She  had  never  let  her  daughter  read  Dos- 
toyevski— as  for  most  of  the  Russians  writing  nowa- 

180 


DOWN    THE    VOLGA 

days,  of  course,  no  young  girl  could  glance  at  them. 
The  daughter,  who  at  home  would  have  been  read- 
ing everything  in  sight,  listened  obediently  and 
really  gave  one  the  idea  she  never  had  read  Dos- 
toyevski,  and  never  would  till  her  mother  gave  per- 
mission. Like  many  of  these  carefully  guarded  Eu- 
ropeans, she  was  older  in  some  thuigs  and  younger 
in  others  than  most  American  girls  of  the  same 
age.  Her  social  judgments  were  those  of  a  trained 
woman  of  the  world,  but  she  enjoyed  the  most 
infantile  games  and  could  not  be  left  alone  with 
a  man  for  more  than  a  moment  without  beginning 
to  look  around  imeasily  and  edge  away  toward  her 
mother.  Once  we  stood  by  the  rail  looking  at  a 
birch  forest. 

"Birches  are  our  trees,"  she  said.  "Whenever  we 
go  traveUing  in  Europe  and  I  see  a  white  birch,  I 
am  homesick  for  Russia." 

The  next  day  or  the  next,  late  in  the  afternoon, 
a  railroad  bridge  high  in  air,  like  the  bridge  across 
the  Hudson  at  Poughkeepsie,  appeared  down- 
stream. It  carried  the  railroad  which  leads  from 
Archangel  and  the  White  Sea  down  to  Moscow — 
much  used  for  munitions  these  days — and,  lest  we 
might  whistle  or  shake  our  fists  at  it  and  bring  it 
down,  we  were  all  ordered,  war  fashion,  into  the 
saloon.  Just  below  the  bridge  came  Yaroslav,  an 
old  town  of  about  a  hundred  thousand  people,  and 

181 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

the  first  chance  we  had  to  enjoy  the  pleasant  river 
custom  of  going  ashore  and  getting  a  bit  ac- 
quainted. 

Yaroslav  made  me  think  of  towns  in  Spanish 
America.  There  were  similar  low  stucco  houses, 
painted  white  and  tan,  and  even  pink  and  blue; 
the  same  National  Cash  Register  and  Singer  sew- 
ing-machine agencies — it  is  pronounced  ''Zing-ger^^ 
in  Russia,  and  supposed,  in  these  suspicious  days, 
to  be  something  or  other  German.  The  churches 
were  just  as  many,  although  Greek  instead  of  Roman, 
and  the  peasants,  praying  and  crossing  themselves 
there,  represented  a  stage  of  development  not  un- 
like that  of  the  peons  of  Mexico  and  South  America. 
The  moving-picture  shows  and  occasional  comer 
bootblack  had  the  same  exotic  air,  and  altogether 
one  had  much  the  same  feeling  of  being  out  of  the 
world  and  set  back  into  the  life  of  several  genera- 
tions ago. 

In  the  shady  park,  which  is  a  fixture  of  all  these 
Russian  provincial  towns,  people  were  promenad- 
ing much  as  they  do  in  Spanish  America,  and  in 
the  dark,  roving  eyes,  the  brooding  melancholy  of 
some  girl  sitting  alone  with  an  open  book  in  her 
lap,  there  were  continual  hints  of  a  capacity  for 
intense  feeling,  of  minds  inclined  to  gloomy  long- 
ings and  despairs. 

The  park  walk  led  down  to  a  promenade  on  the 

182 


DOWN    THE    VOLGA 

edge  of  the  bluff  above  the  river,  where  girls,  two 
by  two,  student  boys  in  belted  blouses,  and  jolly 
young  officers,  in  tan  blouses  and  high  tight  leather 
boots,  were  walking.  We  were  still  in  the  zone  of 
the  white  nights,  although  two  or  three  degrees 
south  of  Petrograd  now,  and,  although  it  was  already 
ten  o'clock,  the  daylight  still  held.  The  broad 
river,  down  below,  was  smooth  as  glass  and  covered 
with  Httle  boats— people  out  rowing,  singing,  just 
staying  up,  without  thought  or  worry,  as  people 
do  in  the  white  nights. 

I  went  back  to  the  steamer,  and,  taking  one  of 
the  Httle  tables  on  the  open  deck,  had  some  tea. 
Other  passengers,  at  other  little  tables,  were  chatting 
in  low  tones  and  also  sipping  tea.  Now  and  then 
oars  splashed  close  by.  Once  a  boat  came  under 
the  stem  with  a  girl  rowmg,  a  girl  in  white,  with 
fine  shoulders,  and  another  gii'l  and  a  young  man 
in  the  stern,  strumming  a  balalaika.  And  over 
everything  the  white  night  threw  its  curious  mi- 
reality.  Things  close  by  or  facing  the  hidden  sun 
stood  out  in  a  sort  of  afterglow;  those  between 
one  and  the  brighter  side  of  the  sky  were  in  sil- 
houette. 

Across  the  bridge  up-stream,  in  the  luminous 
stillness,  slowly  rolled  a  tiny  train,  like  something 
on  the  stage,  cut  from  cardboard.  And  the  war, 
toward  which  that  little  toy  train  was  doubtless 

183 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

carrying  shells  and  ambulances  and  automobiles, 
became  almost  immaterial,  something  that  here, 
in  this  imier  Russia,  was  only  a  sort  of  tragic  under- 
tone. 

Suddenly,  in  one  of  those  far-off  specks  of  boats, 
a  girl  began  singing.  One  couldn't  see  her  or  see 
anything  but  that  tiny  silhouette,  and  the  voice 
rose  like  a  disembodied  spirit.  It  rose  across  the 
hushed  water,  higher  and  clearer,  as  if  she  were 
trying  to  sing  all  the  beauty  of  the  night,  and  the 
loneliness  of  Yaroslav,  and  the  tragedy  over  there 
in  the  west.  It  rose  and  rang,  and  all  at  once  one 
had  fallen  in  love  with  a  silhouette  half  a  mile  or 
so  across  the  river.  Beautiful  she  must  be,  and  as 
the  steamer  was  sailing  in  a  moment  she  could 
always  remain  so.  And  out  of  the  flickering  stream 
of  things  had  come  one  of  those  instants  which  one 
does  not  forget — that  unknown  lady  of  Yaroslav 
one  would  never  know,  and  the  white  night,  and 
the  little  train  rolling  across  the  high  bridge,  and 
the  voice  ringing  out  across  the  amber  water. 

The  Petrograd  young  lady,  who  had  also  heard 
the  singing,  remarked  next  day  that  she  thought 
the  voice  a  trifle  strained,  and  that,  for  her,  sing- 
ing, and  mdeed  all  art,  ought  to  be  restrained,  just 
so,  and  a  little  below  rather  than  above  the  artist's 
strength.  We  were  passing  Kostroma  at  that  time 
and  the  cotton-mills  of  the  Konavalofs — one  of 

184 


DOWN    THE    VOLGA 

those  patriarchal  cotton-spinning  families  of  which 
there  are  a  number  in  Russia. 

A  little  farther  on  came  Nizhni  Novgorod,  where 
the  great  fair  is  held  every  August,  and  where  an- 
other river,  nearly  a  thousand  miles  long,  the  Oka, 
comes  in  from  the  south,  bringing  with  it  the  water 
of  the  Httle  river  which  flows  through  Moscow. 
Nizhni  is  both  new  and  very  old,  and  one  rides  in 
modern  trolley-cars  past  ancient  saw-tooth  Tatar 
walls,  which  go  back  to  the  fourteenth  century. 
The  quarter  where  the  fair  is  held  lies  across  the 
Oka  from  the  city  proper,  and  is  a  little  city  by 
itself.  There  are  four  thousand  shops  in  the  main 
bazaar  and  four  thousand  more  outside  of  it,  and 
they  look,  during  all  that  part  of  the  year  during 
which  they  are  closed,  a  good  deal  like  the  whole- 
sale grocery  section  of  an  American  city  on  a  Sun- 
day. In  August,  however,  four  hundred  thousand 
strangers  come  to  Nizhni  from  all  over  Russia  and 
near-by  Asia,  over  a  billion  dollars'  worth  of  busi- 
ness is  done,  and  prices  and  credits,  in  many  lines, 
are  fixed  for  the  rest  of  the  year. 

We  got  to  Nizhni  before  breakfast  time,  and  I 
gave  up  the  luxury  of  coffee  under  the  deck  awning 
to  experimenting  with  a  provincial  hotel.  There 
was  a  big,  hot  dining-room  full  of  men,  flies  swarmed, 
and  waiters  with  sashes  about  their  loose  blouses 
pattered  about  with  big  china  pots  of  hot  water 

185 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

and  tea.  An  ikon,  according  to  Russian  custom, 
looked  down  from  the  corner  of  the  room,  and  many 
turned  toward  it  and  crossed  themselves  before 
and  after  eating.  There  was  a  good  deal  of  loud, 
good-natured  talking,  and  here  and  there,  as  always 
in  a  Russian  tea-drinking  place,  bearded,  prophet- 
like individuals  gazing  into  space,  and  thinking  of 
nothing,  doubtless,  but  looking  as  if  they  were 
grappling  with  the  riddle  of  the  universe. 

"...  If  a  dozen  EngHshmen  get  together,  they 
at  once  begin  to  talk  of  the  submarine  telegraph 
or  the  tax  on  paper,  or  a  method  of  tanning  rat- 
skins,  or  something,  that  is  to  say,  practical  and 
definite,  but  let  a  dozen  Russians  get  together,  and 
instantly  there  springs  up  a  question  of  the  signif- 
icance and  future  of  Russia,  and  in  terms  so  gen- 
eral, beginning  with  creation,  without  facts  or  con- 
clusion; they  woriy  and  worry  at  the  unlucky 
subject  as  children  chew  away  at  a  bit  of  India- 
rubber.  ..."  This  was  written  a  good  many 
years  ago,  about  intelligentsia  more  sophisticated 
than  the  men  in  the  Nizhni  dining-room,  but  it 
doubtless  applied  to  some  of  them,  nevertheless. 

Russian  hotels  reflect  Russian  society.  There 
is,  comparatively  speaking,  no  middle  class,  and, 
so  far  as  hotels  go,  one  jumps  from  the  best  to  the 
worst.  In  a  provincial  hotel  of  this  sort  guests 
bring  their  own  bedding  often,   bugs  of  various 

186 


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N3 


DOWN   THE    VOLGA 

kinds  ai'e  taken  more  or  less  for  granted,  and  the 
wall-paper  of  these  dismal  rooms  is  frequently- 
spotted  with  the  slain.  The  crudity  of  most  of  these 
places  was  one  of  the  reasons  for  the  popularity 
of  the  Volga  trip.  For  the  boats  were  clean  and 
comfortable,  one  got  a  glimpse  of  all  the  towns 
along  the  way,  and  could  travel  clear  across  Russia 
and  back  again  without  once  bothering  to  show  a 
passport  or  report  to  the  poHce,  as  the  stranger 
usually  must  wherever  he  spends  the  night. 

When  you  order  tea  in  such  a  place,  the  waiter 
brings  a  glass,  a  slice  or  two  of  lemon,  a  little  pot 
of  tea,  and  hot  water  in  a  big  china  pot,  so  thick 
that  it  keeps  the  water  hot  forever.  You  pour 
about  half  an  inch  of  tea  into  the  glass,  fill  it  up 
with  water,  and  keep  this  up  indefinitely.  It  is  one 
of  the  few  cheap  things  in  Russia.  The  humbler 
people  do  not  put  sugar  into  their  tea  generally, 
but  clip  a  bit  off  a  lump  with  a  pair  of  pincers  and 
hide  it  away  under  their  tongues  somewhere.  At 
Nizhni  that  morning  there  was  no  sugar  at  all,  on 
account  of  the  war,  and  they  served  little  colored 
lozenges  like  cough-drops. 

The  tea  which  rounds  off  every  Russian  evening 
at  home  is  a  dehghtful  institution.  The  tea  is  so 
weak — merely  hot  lemonade  with  a  dash  of  real 
tea — that  it  won't  keep  any  one  awake.  The  sam- 
ovar with  its  charcoal  fire  and  rising  cloud  of  steam 

187 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

is  as  cheerful  as  an  open  fireplace,  and  round  it  people 
can  talk  for  hours. 

We  tied  up  next  morning  at  the  shabby  collec- 
tion of  shops  and  dilapidated  hotels,  which  serve 
as  the  river  station  for  the  city  of  Kazan^  some  five 
miles  away  from  the  river.  Kazan  was  the  capital 
of  the  kingdom  established  by  the  Golden  Horde 
when  they  drove  the  Bulgars  out  of  these  parts, 
and  it  is  now  a  city  of  nearly  two  hundred  thousand 
people,  with  a  university,  and  the  intellectual  centre, 
in  a  way,  of  this  middle  and  lower  Volga  country. 
It  sounds  more  Oriental  than  it  looks,  but  it  has 
a  considerable  Tatar  quarter,  and  a  Tatar  family 
got  aboard  the  steamer.  The  father  was  a  little, 
middle-aged  man  with  thick  spectacles  who  looked 
like  a  Chinese  mandarin  dressed  in  western  clothes. 
The  wife  was  an  odd,  pasty-faced  little  woman  with 
queer  clothes,  and  there  were  two  adorable  little 
children.  The  boy  was  particularly  quaint,  and 
when  the  passengers  played  blind  man's  buff  he 
would  iim  back  to  his  father,  nearly  wriggling  out 
of  his  skin  with  excitement.  The  tall  Pole,  after 
regarding  the  Tatar  gravely  for  some  time,  re- 
marked: "He's  a  good  father!" 

The  Kama,  with  the  water  of  the  west  slope  of 
the  Urals,  comes  in  below  Kazan — the  Pole  and  his 
daughter  scanning  it  with  some  curiosity  as  the 
beginning  of  their  later  adventures — and  from  here 

188 


DOWN    THE    VOLGA 

the  Volga  swings  south.  It  crosses  the  province 
of  Simbirsk,  and  at  the  town  of  Simbirsk  we  lost 
part  of  our  happy  family — two  sisters  and  a  brother 
on  their  way,  with  their  Finnish  governess,  to 
spend  the  summer  with  relatives  in  the  country. 
They  were  a  lonely  trio,  who  had  known  little  of 
life,  except  what  they  had  seen  in  remote  country 
houses  and  convent  schools  or  read  in  books,  and 
the  boat  and  the  people  they  had  met  had  been 
a  great  adventure.  The  older  sister,  a  shy,  pinched 
little  lady  of  twenty-two  or  twenty-three,  was  full 
of  tears.  They  all  spoke  a  little  English,  in  a  slow, 
precise  way,  but  the  good-natured,  sensible  govern- 
ess talked  it,  as  well  as  several  other  languages. 
She  had  often  helped  me  with  the  Russian  bill  of 
fare,  and  she  spoke  interestingly  of  books,  schools, 
and  things  in  general.  American  children's  books 
she  liked  particularly,  she  said,  and  every  well- 
brought-up  Russian  child  knew  in  translation  Louisa 
Alcott's  stories  and  "Little  Lord  Fauntleroy." 

The  river  was  wide  now,  a  slow-flowing  brown 
flood  with  frequent  sandy  islands.  Big  oil-tankers, 
deep  laden  until  they  were  almost  awash,  were 
being  pushed  up-river,  with  petroleum  from  Baku. 
Passenger-steamers  went  by,  with  waving  hand- 
kerchiefs, and  every  few  miles  we  passed  huge  log 
rafts.  They  were  guided  with  long  sweeps,  and 
the  lumbermen — there  were  women  sometimes — 

189 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

slept  in  a  little  shack  and  cooked  over  an  open  fire 
as  if  they  were  still  in  the  woods — a  curious  life, 
drifting  almost  imperceptibly  week  after  week;  in 
the  worid,  yet  out  of  it,  with  gay  steamers  swash- 
ing by,  shaking  the  whole  raft  as  if  it  were  cloth 
stage  waves. 

When  the  Russians,  driving  the  Mongols  back, 
took  Kazan  and  pushed  down  to  the  Caspian,  they 
needed  frontier  forts  to  keep  the  river  open,  and 
foimded  the  cities  of  Samara,  Saratov,  and  Tzarit- 
syn.  They  are  busy  modem  towns  now.  Samara, 
which  comes  fii'st,  has  more  than  a  hundred  thou- 
sand people,  and  is  on  the  main  railroad  line  to 
Siberia.  Saratov,  lower  down,  is  still  bigger  and 
liveHer.  With  its  asphalt  and  trolley-care,  brand- 
new  university  building,  big  station,  and  general 
air  of  business,  it  is  a  good  deal  like  some  growing 
city  in  our  own  Southwest. 

One  morning,  in  this  part  of  the  river,  I  got  off 
at  a  little  station  to  buy  some  cherries,  and  an  old 
man  who  saw  me  with  them  asked  in  German  if 
there  were  any  more  for  sale.  When  I  replied,  he 
said,  "Sind  sie  Deutsch?^^  as  if  to  find  a  German 
here  in  war-time  and  speak  German  to  him  would 
be  quite  a  matter  of  course.  He  was  one  of  the 
German-Russians  of  whom  there  are  many  in  this 
part  of  Russia.  They  were  brought  in  at  the  in- 
vitation of  Katherine  II,  in  1762,  and  lands  and 

190 


DOWN    THE    VOLGA 

special  privileges  given  them  with  the  idea  that 
they  would  educate  the  natives.  The  latter  haven't 
imitated  them  very  successfully,  and  the  colonists 
have  remained  German  in  much  the  same  way  that 
they  have  in  our  own  Pennsylvania  Dutch  country. 
You  will  still  find  such  names  as  Zurich,  Unter- 
walden,  Siisenthal,  Luzerne,  Katerinstadt,  and  so 
on,  the  villages  are  always  cleaner  and  thriftier 
than  those  about  them,  and  the  descendants  of  the 
original  settlers  still  cling  to  their  fathers'  tongue. 

Since  the  war  their  position  has  not  been  pleas- 
ant. Although  Russian  citizens,  many  have  been 
treated  as  enemy  aliens  and  driven  from  their  homes, 
and  their  whole  experience  is  another  of  those  by- 
products of  the  world  war  whose  solution  will  be 
one  of  the  countless  problems  in  its  final  liquida- 
tion. 

The  passengers  were  well  acquainted  by  this 
time,  and  began  to  feel  as  if  they  were  on  their  own 
house-boat.  Every  few  hours  the  steamer  would 
swing  round  with  the  current  and  come  up  to  a 
wharf,  nose  up-stream,  and  everybody  crowded  to 
the  rail,  more  sights  to  see.  There  was  always  a 
gendaiTne  at  the  gangway,  the  same  symbol  of 
imperial  authority  which  one  would  have  seen  in 
Petrograd,  or  Omsk,  or  Tomsk,  or  Vladivostok,  and 
there  was  always  a  little  herd  of  peasants — men, 
women,  babies,  packs,  and  teakettles — ^waiting,  with 

191 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

their  look  of  driven  cattle,  to  push  on  or  push  off, 
or,  rather,  to  do  both  at  the  same  time. 

Those  who  stayed  at  home  lined  up  against  the 
wharf-shed,  staring  at  us  and  chewing  simflower 
seeds.  The  Russian  peasants  chew  sunflower  seeds 
as  Americans — not  peasants,  necessarily — chew  gum. 
They  are  extremely  expert,  and  without  looking  or 
thinking,  apparently,  crack  the  seed  between  their 
teeth,  lick  up  the  meat,  and  spit  out  the  shell,  like 
so  many  squirrels.  If  a  peasant  stands  still  for 
half  an  hour,  he  leaves  sunflower-seed  shells  all 
round  him. 

If  there  were  time,  passengers  went  ashore,  to 
come  back  with  strawberries  and  cherries,  hard- 
boiled  eggs,  milk,  cheese,  bread,  fried  fish,  and 
even  whole  roast  chicken.  Russians  are  great  at 
this  sort  of  foraging.  They  make  good  gypsies. 
Families  travel  with  vast  lunches,  and  all  but  the 
most  uppish  sort  of  people  carry  a  teapot  as  a 
matter  of  course.  Half  the  passengers  on  our  boat 
ordered  little  from  the  ship-kitchen  but  tea  and 
an  occasional  hot  made  dish — the  rest  they  picked 
up,  at  peasant  prices,  on  the  way. 

Every  Russian  railroad-station  of  any  size  has 
its  buffet  and  samovar  always  steaming,  and  even 
in  the  dreariest  places  one  can  almost  always  get 
at  least  hot  tea.  And  with  hot  tea  almost  anything 
solid  can  be  made  into  a  passable  lunch.     Gen- 

192 


DOWN    THE    VOLGA 

erally,  too,  there  is  a  big  hot-water  tank  on  the 
station  platform;  \sdth  a  wood-fire  always  burning, 
intended  primarily  for  soldiers,  but  open  to  any- 
body. In  the  traktirs,  or  cheap  tea-houses,  the 
proprietor  not  only  pennits  but  expects  his  cus- 
tomers to  bring  their  lunch. 

So  it  was  on  the  boat.  The  first-class  passengers 
were  alwa3^s  bringing  candies,  biscuits,  and  pre- 
serves to  the  table,  while  the  second-class  brought 
their  bread  and  hard-boiled  eggs  and  fiaiit,  and 
often  ordered  nothing  but  tea.  With  part  of  the 
big  pot  of  hot  water  they  washed  the  cups  and  the 
fruit  they  had  bought,  then  crushed  the  fruit  in  a 
glass  and  stirred  it  up  with  the  tea.  All  this  easy- 
going scouting  ashore  and  lunching  aboard  ship 
made  one  feel  mightily  superior  to  our  modern 
devices  for  taking  the  fun  out  of  travelling  and 
shooting  people  from  place  to  place,  like  packages 
in  pneimiatic  tubes,  in  rooms  as  near  as  possible 
like  the  ones  they  are  trying  to  escape  from. 

The  first-cabin  dining-room  was  at  the  bow  and 
the  second-cabin  at  the  stern.  The  promenade 
went  round  the  two,  and  the  staterooms  were  in 
between.  There  was  httle  difference  between  them 
except  that  the  first-cabin  rooms  were  forward, 
where  the  breeze  was  fresher.  Several  of  the  first- 
class  passengers  were  well-to-do,  even  rather  sump- 
tuous Jews,  who  suggested  Spaniards  and  Aimenians 

193 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

rather  than  flower-and-feather  lofts  and  ready- 
made  clothing. 

There  was  a  widow  with  a  spoUed  little  boy — a 
handsome  woman  with  pmple-black  hair,  who 
looked  like  a  Zoloaga  portrait,  and  was  continually 
disappearing  into  her  stateroom  and  reappearing, 
swathed  in  divers  shawls  and  mantilla-like  draperies, 
lest  the  likeness  be  lost.  Then  there  was  a  comfort- 
able-looking manufacturing  family  from  Moscow, 
consisting  of  a  pleasant  mother,  a  grown  son  who 
would  have  passed  at  home  for  a  Turk,  and  two 
unmarried  daughters  with  opulent  lines. 

The  younger  had  just  been  graduated  from  the 
university,  and  combined  in  the  quaintest  fashion 
the  look  of  a  thoroughly  modern  yoimg  woman 
who  knew  what  women  were  doing  and  thinking 
in  the  West  with  an  air  and  walk  that  suggested 
shady  Oriental  courts,  cushions,  and  splashing 
fountains.  She  had  the  look  of  wanting  to  know 
people,  but  was  shy  and  resei'ved,  and  when  she 
did  talk  to  strangers,  it  was  always  with  a  grave 
air  of  defense,  as  if  she  knew  the  danger  of  being 
snubbed  and  were  not  going  to  give  any  one  the 
chance. 

I  was  talking  one  day  with  a  Duma  member, 
a  highly  educated,  nervous  httle  man  who  spoke 
rapidly  and  with  great  vivacity,  then  suddenly 
would  stop  and  have  no  expression  at  all.     The 

194 


DOWN    THE    VOLGA 

Jews,  he  said,  had  not  improved  their  condition 
since  the  war.  Those  who  went  as  soldiers  gave  up 
too  easily.  Most  of  the  spies  had  been  Jews.  After 
they  were  captured  they  often  became  interpreters 
for  the  enemy,  and  as  they  were  well  treated  in 
this  job,  they  could  take  an  aggrieved  air  and  say 
that  they  were  treated  better  by  the  Germans  than 
they  were  at  home.  The  Jews  themselves  say  that 
such  reports  were  systematically  circulated  by  the 
old  regime  as  part  of  its  anti-Jewish  propaganda. 

It  is  natural  that  many  spies  should  be  Jews, 
for  the  simple  reason  that  the  neighborhoods  across 
which  the  lines  run,  where  spies  would  be  useful, 
are  those  thickly  inhabited  by  Jews.  And  cer- 
tainly their  past  persecutions  and  the  suspicion 
with  which  even  those  who  enlisted  were  regarded 
was  not  calculated  to  add  to  their  enthusiasm  or 
loyalty. 

Any  one  who  has  had  even  a  superficial  ac- 
quaintance with  the  easy-going  Russian  can  under- 
stand his  opposition  to  the  Jew.  It  is  a  simple 
case  of  self-preservation.  In  the  Pale,  in  such  a 
town  as  Minsk,  for  instance,  the  characteristics 
about  which  the  rest  of  the  world  generally  com- 
plains are  more  accented  than  among  the  Jews  we 
see  in  America.  To  the  Russians,  indeed,  these  poor 
people  seem  less  like  fellow  citizens  than  a  sort  of 
alien  beast  of  prey.    Yet  it  is  difficult  to  tell  which 

195 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

is  cause  and  which  effect;  and  easy  to  imagme  that 
if  one  were  treated  as  these  people  have  been,  one 
would  also  become  a  sort  of  beast  of  prey  and  feel 
that  any  victory  over  the  Gentile  was  merely  get- 
ting back  part  of  an  unpayable  debt. 

The  second  cabin,  as  is  often  the  case,  was  the 
most  genial  half  of  the  boat,  and  when  supper  was 
over  and  the  passengers  there,  still  lounging  about 
the  tables,  sipping  tea,  began  to  sing,  a  good  many 
of  the  first-cabin  passengers  came  back  and  joined 
in.  The  Russians  are  great  hands  at  singing.  They 
are  naturally  intensely  fond  of  music,  and  their 
church  services,  without  an  organ  or  other  artificial 
music,  accustom  them  early  to  singing  together 
and  carrying  a  part.  Ten  minutes  after  a  long- 
haired young  fellow  in  a  student's  blouse,  on  his 
hone^Tnoon,  had  started  a  song,  when  we  were 
two  or  three  nights  out,  an  impromptu  chorus  was 
singmg  together  with  as  much  volume  and  finish  as 
the  average  glee-club  at  home  acquires  after  weeks 
of  practice. 

Grouped  about  him,  as  he  stood  with  his  hands 
in  his  pockets,  leaning  against  the  saloon-door, 
were  several  young  people,  an  officer  on  his  way 
home  on  furlough  from  the  front,  a  priest  in  his 
cassock  playing  chess  with  the  purser,  and  every 
now  and  then  joining  in,  and  one  big,  old  boyar  of 
a  Russian,  with  a  beard  down  to  his  waist,  who 

196 


DOWN    THE    VOLGA 

had  not  opened  his  head  since  he  came  aboard  at 
a  village  station  the  day  before,  but  as  soon  as  the 
songs  began,  joined  in  with  a  bass  as  big  as  a  house. 
He  seemed  to  know  all  the  songs  the  young  man 
sang,  Eveiybody  seemed  to  know  them.  In  the 
most  genial  fashion,  noticing  that  I  was  merely 
listening,  they  asked  if  I  wouldn't  join  in,  too. 

They  sang  of  Stenka  Razin,  the  old-time  Volga 
highwayman,  who  threw  his  Persian  princess  into 
the  river,  when  his  men  complained  that  she  was 
making  him  soft  and  forgetful  of  his  robber's 
work,  with  the  remark  that  no  Don  Cossack  had 
ever  given  Mother  Volga  such  a  present  as  this. 
Stenka  Razin  lived  in  the  seventeenth  century  and 
cut  a  tremendous  swath  up  and  down  the  river. 
He  captured  Astrakhan  and  various  other  river- 
towns,  sailed  out  into  the  Caspian,  smashed  a  Per- 
sian fleet,  and  ravaged  the  Caspian  shores,  was 
finally  beaten  and  captured  while  tr3dng  to  estab- 
lish a  Cossack  kingdom,  taken  back  to  Moscow, 
and  quartered  aHve. 

They  sang  other  Volga  songs  and  "Days  of  Our 
Life,"  and  a  mom-nful  ballad  about  a  man  in  prison, 
forbidden  in  Russia  a  few  years  ago.  The  songs 
were  wild  and  sad,  with  big  booming  basses — songs 
that  belonged  to  the  broad,  slow  river  and  the 
monotonous  Russian  plain.  You  could  imagine 
these  Russians  understanding  "Suwanee  River," 

197 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

or  "Home,  Sweet  Home,"  or  "Old  Black  Joe," 
but  rather  dumfounded  before  most  of  the  things 
such  a  crowd  would  be  singing  at  home — "Alex- 
ander's Ragtime  Band,"  or  "You  Got  a  Great  Big 
Baby  Smile." 

The  migratory  peasants  crowding  the  lower 
deck,  with  their  teapots  and  fried  fish  and  babies, 
lived  quite  as  if  they  were  still  at  home  and  under 
the  roof  of  their  own  houses.  The  pleasant  sun- 
shine and  enforced  idleness  attracted  many  to 
various  sorts  of  personal  renovation.  One  noble- 
looking  old  fellow  lay  with  his  head  in  his  wife's 
lap,  while  she  went  through  his  shaggy  mane  with 
a  fine-tooth  comb.  There  was  one  clean-looking 
peasant  girl  who  was  thus  minutely  gone  over  by 
one  of  her  friends.  The  woman  with  the  comb 
worked  as  expertly  and  as  fast  as  if  she  was  crochet- 
ing. One  thumb  travelled  slowly  up  a  part  in  the 
girl's  hair,  the  other  hand  kept  the  comb  darting 
as  the  game  was  speared  between  its  teeth  and  her 
thumb-nail.  Snap  .  .  .  snap  .  .  .  snap  ...  So 
she  went  over  the  whole  head,  one  part  after  an- 
other, as  methodically  and  rapidly  as  if  she  were 
knitting.  When  it  was  done  the  girl  raised  her 
flushed  face,  shook  out  her  long  hair,  quickly  did 
it  up,  tied  a  black  net  over  it,  and  a  white  kerchief 
over  that,  and  became  a  fresh-faced,  clean-looking 
peasant  again. 

198 


DOWN    THE    VOLGA 

At  Saratov  half  a  dozen  passenger-boats  met, 
and  there  was  a  great  waving  of  handkerchiefs 
and  visiting  back  and  forth.  After  watching  them 
a  while  I  went  ashore,  and  on  the  wharf  ran  into 
quite  another  current.  A  woman  with  four  chil- 
dren, with  a  few  household  things  and  a  dirty  mat- 
tress, were  camped  there — one  little  drop  from  the 
deluge  of  refugees  which  poured  back  across  Russia 
during  the  retreat  of  1915. 

I  gave  the  Httle  girl  one  of  the  stamps  which 
pass  for  small  change  in  Russia  now,  and  when  I 
came  back,  half  an  hour  later,  the  mother  hurried 
over  to  meet  me.  She  lifted  up  her  baby  boy  to 
press  his  crumby  hps  against  my  hand,  just  as 
peasant  mothers  lift  their  babies  up  to  kiss  the 
holy  pictures  in  church.  And,  weeping,  she  poured 
out  her  story.  They  had  come  up  from  Astrakhan 
because  they  all  had  malaria  there.  Her  husband 
had  gone  off  to  try  to  find  work,  she  had  nothing, 
no  place  to  go,  what  should  she  do?  Millions, 
literally,  of  people  just  like  her  were  asking  the 
same  question — and  there  was  no  answer.  And  in 
the  middle  of  her  story  the  big  steamer  whistled 
and  swimg  on  down-river. 

At  one  of  the  village  stations  several  himdred 
peasant  boys,  a  new  levy  of  cannon  fodder,  were 
lined  up  on  the  beach,  waiting  for  the  boat.  They 
were  boimd  for  some  drilling-place  farther  south. 

199 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

It  seemed  as  if  the  whole  countryside  thereabout 
must  have  been  swept  clean  of  young  men.  They 
were  jolly  enough  about  it^  however,  and  came 
tramping  aboard  in  their  sheepskin  jackets,  with 
their  teakettles  and  balalaikas,  and  danced  and 
wrestled  and  sang,  as  husky  and  thoughtless  as  so 
many  young  range  steers. 

With  them  came  a  handful  of  prisoners — six  or 
eight  Austro-Hungarians  and  two  or  three  Ger- 
mans— on  their  way  down-river  to  work,  it  was 
said,  in  an  ammimition  factory.  Their  uniforms 
were  patched,  several  Hmped,  and  one  or  two  looked 
as  if  they  had  just  left  the  hospital.  Jammed  in 
with  the  peasants  on  the  lower  deck,  they  stared 
at  the  water,  or  tried  to  play  cards,  or  blinked  up 
at  the  passengers,  staring  down  at  them,  as  if  it 
mattered  little  what  came  next. 

That  evening  a  thunder-storm  cleared  the  lower 
deck  and  drove  everybody  under  cover.  After  it 
was  over  and  most  of  the  passengers  had  gone  to 
bed,  I  was  taking  a  turn  around  the  still  dripping 
deck  when  the  prisoners  came  out  by  the  stem. 
One  had  part  of  a  package  of  cigarettes,  which  he 
divided  carefully  all  round,  another  produced  a 
ragged  little  note-book  and  passed  it  respectfully 
to  the  only  one  among  them  who  had  any  officer's 
marks.  In  the  book  were  written  down  the  words 
of  their  songs,  and,  with  the  officer  leading,  they 
started  in  to  sing. 

200 


DOWN    THE    VOLGA 

They  sang  "In  Der  Heimat"  and  "Die  Wacht 
am  Rhein,"  and  it  was  quaint  enough  and  char- 
acteristic of  easy-going  Russian  ways  to  hear  this 
war-song  rising  there  in  the  depths  of  Russia  and 
to  see  the  peasants  shuffle  out  to  listen  solemnly 
and  wonder  what  these  strange  sounds  might  mean. 
A  hundred  indefinable  differences  of  race  and  tem- 
perament were  felt  in  these  songs,  so  different  from 
the  dirge-like  ballads  the  Russians  had  been  sing- 
ing. Quaintest  of  all,  perhaps,  was  when  they 
began  on  "Schifflein,  schiffiein,'^  and  "Little  ship, 
little  ship,  take  me  back'^home,"  rose  gayly,  in  true 
Mdnnerchor  style,  above  the  rumbling  and  splashing 
of  the  screw. 

A  lady  in  black,  with  black-rimmed  glasses,  who 
had  got  on  at  one  of  the  provincial  towns,  leaned 
over  the  rail  beside  me.  "I  am  afraid,"  she  said 
in  French,  "that  our  soldiers  are  weeping  instead 
of  singing,  back  there  in  their  country."  I  told 
her  of  the  hundreds  of  Russian  prisoners  I  had  seen 
in  Hungary,  the  summer  before,  working  in  the 
wheat-fields  and  riding  round  on  hay-wagons  with- 
out any  guard,  almost  as  if  they  were  at  home. 

We  were  long  since  past  the  gay  little  churches 
and  forests  and  green  fields  of  the  upper  Volga,  and 
coming  now  to  the  bare  steppe  countr}\  Over  to 
the  west,  separated  by  a  narrow  isthmus,  was  the 
Don,  another  great  Russian  river,  and  over  there 
the  province  of  the  Don  Cossacks.    The  west  bank 

201 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

was  high  and  steep,  and  goats  crept  hke  flies  across 
it.  Droves  of  cattle  came  down  through  "draws" 
between  the  hills  for  water,  and  often  there  were 
men  bathing  horses,  and  swimming,  themselves, 
in  the  warm,  muddy  river.  One  got  whiffs  of  a 
cattle  and  wheat  country  over  there  behind  the 
hills,  and  at  several  of  the  stops  the  beach  was 
covered  with  grain-sifters — "dust-mills,"  as  their 
German  labels  had  it — ^left  there  by  passing  steamers 
and  not  yet  carted  away  to  the  ranches. 

At  Tzaritsyn,  which,  for  us,  pausing  there  during 
a  breathless  summer  evening,  was  only  a  stairway 
up  the  bluff  and  a  dusty  walk  at  the  top,  and 
a  lonely  little  summer-garden  and  movie  theatre, 
the  river  swings  sharply  southwestward,  and  the 
Volga  delta  begins.  The  main  stream  was  nearly 
two  miles  wide  sometimes,  and  eighty  feet  deep. 
The  whole  country  was  low  and  more  or  less  flooded 
with  the  high  summer  water. 

Swiftly,  on  the  oily  brown  tide,  we  swam  down 
through  the  province  of  Astrakhan.  It  is  a  hot, 
half-Asiatic  country,  inhabited  pnncipally  by  the 
seminomadic  Kalmucks  and  Kirghiz,  and  in  the 
river  proper,  and  the  back  waters  of  its  two  hun- 
dred mouths,  and  in  the  upper  Caspian,  thousands 
make  their  living  by  fishing.  Enormous  quantities, 
mostly  herring  and  sturgeon,  together  with  the 
caviare  which  comes  from  one  variety  of  sturgeon, 

202 


bC 


o 


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ci 


o 


c3 


c3 
O 


bD 


rf 
& 


03 

o 


DOWN    THE    VOLGA 

are  shipped  from  here  up-river.  All  along  the  west 
bank  fish-nets  were  drying  and  people  wading 
through  overflowed  streets.  From  these  waters, 
doubtless,  had  come  most  of  the  dried  fish  which 
we  had  seen  peasants  gnawing  all  the  way  down 
the  river,  as  they  would  gnaw  so  much  toast  or 
baked-potato  skin. 

Another  hot  night  and  in  a  dazzling  morning 
sun  we  came  sailing  down  to  the  white  walls  of 
Astrakhan.  War  and  the  front  were  more  than  a 
thousand  miles  in  an  air  line  northwestward;  north- 
eastward for  five  thousand  miles  this  endless  Russia 
stretched  to  the  Pacific.  And  we  were  at  the  gate 
to  Persia  now.  The  wharf  was  piled  with  bales 
of  licorice-root,  and  all  day  long  the  Persian  steve- 
dores— ^handsome,  slender  fellows,  who  can  carry 
a  whole  bale  of  cotton  on  their  backs,  and  still  con- 
trive to  look  like  descendants  of  the  line  of  kings — 
were  pattering  up  the  gangway  with  bales  of  Turke- 
stan cotton. 

We  strolled  up-town  past  white  walls  that  made 
one  squint,  through  another  saw-tooth  Tatar  citadel, 
where  good-natured  Russian  soldiers  were  drows- 
ing about  the  barracks,  tried  the  apricot  and  sherbet 
sellers,  and  under  the  white  cathedral  saw  sprawled 
in  the  rust  just  such  a  collection  of  variegated 
rags  and  Oriental  faces  as  you  might  expect  to 
find  in  the  depths  of  Asia. 

203 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

The  shade  in  the  Httle  park  was  blacker  and 
thicker  than  in  the  north,  and  people  drowsed  on 
the  benches  or  sipped  ices  in  the  kiosk  in  true  trop- 
ical fashion.  There  were  irrigation  ditches  over- 
hung with  mulberry-trees,  and  we  stained  fingers 
and  faces  purple  with  the  wet  fruit;  we  visited  a 
Persian  mosque  and  trailed  through  a  melancholy- 
museum  filled  with  dilapidated  diy  fish.  The  Polish 
gentleman  and  his  daughter  and  I  fulfilled  this 
latter  duty,  the  father  and  I  in  the  lead,  the  lovely 
daughter  trailing  behind,  bored  to  death.  It  was 
frightfully  hot. 

"My  daughter,"  confided  the  tall  Pole,  looking 
back  at  her  loitering  half  a  block  behind,  under 
her  parasol,  "is  a  good  fellow,  and  I  love  her  deai'ly, 
but  she  is,  you  know,  just  a  trifle  capricietise." 

It  was  hot  that  night,  hot  and  breathless  as 
Kansas  in  harvest-time,  and  the  youth  and  beauty 
of  Astrakhan,  for  whom  the  visits  of  the  up-river 
steamers  were  a  social  event,  came  down  to  walk, 
two  by  two,  around  the  deck  until  the  lights  were 
turned  out  and  they  were  sent  ashore.  The  boat 
was  a  pleasant  home  by  this  time.  I  had  started 
in  to  go  to  Samara,  had  stretched  the  journey  to 
Saratov,  and  finally  come  all  the  way.  Everybody 
knew  everybody  now,  and  one  was  tempted  to  go 
back  and  sec  the  river  and  the  towns,  and  the 
peasants  chewuig  sunflower  seeds,  all  over  again. 

204 


DOWN    THE    VOLGA 

But  life  is  short  and  Russia  is  long,  and  at  Saratov 
I  left  the  steamer  and  took  an  overnight  express. 
All  evening,  with  windows  open,  we  rode  through 
cool,  fresh-smelling  prairie  comitiy,  like  our  own 
Middle  West,  and  in  the  morning,  a  week  ahead 
of  the  boat,  saw  the  golden  domes  of  Moscow. 


205 


IX 
VOLGA  REFUGEES 

We  are  by  no  means  a  cruel  people. 

Bvt  dreadfully  cruel  things  happen  in  our  country. 

We  can  make  penal  senntude  into  hell,  and  life  into  penal  servitude. 

All  thanks  to  our  inability  to  take  measures  in  time. 

The  tendency  to  delay. 

To  delay  fatally. 

Always,  and  in  everything. 

It  had  been  decided  in  the  face  of  the  astonishing  invasion  of  the 
enemy  to  leave  for  him  a  desert. 

That  is  the  frusiness  of  the  war-chiefs. 

Our  business,  the  business  of  the  rear,  was  to  organize  the  reception 
of  these  millions  of  people  who  have  been  deprived  of  everything  in  order 
that  the  enemy  may  be  beaten. 

Obviously  the  movemeixl  of  the  fugitives  from  their  villages  did  not 
begin  yesterday.    It  is  the  ninth,  the  tenth  week: 

— That  they  have  been  on  the  road. 

It  is  the  fourth  month  since  they  started — and  only  now  in  the  prov- 
ince of  Mogilev: 

— Are  they  building  barracks. 

This  elemental  movement 

Was  more  than  human  strength  could  manage. 

To  save  all  from  disease  was  impossible. 

But  we  could  have  discounted  this  movement. 

Could  have  reckoned: 

— When  and  where  the  fugitives  would  be. 

The  distance  such  and  such.    A  horse  in  a  day  can  da  so  much. 

This  is  a  "train  problem,"  the  sort  that  pupils  in  the  first  dass  in 
school  work  out.  .  .  . 

— From  Doroshevitch's  "The  Wat  of  the  Cross." 

It  was  at  Astrakhan  that  I  ran  into  some  of  the 
backwash  of  that  flood  of  humanity  which  poured 
eastward  across  Russia  from  Poland  and  Galicia 
during  the  great  retreat  of  1915.    This  particular 

206 


VOLGA    REFUGEES 

stream  had  flowed  across  the  Urals  and  down  into 
Turkestan  as  far  as  Tashkend — almost  to  Bokhara. 
Typhus  had  taken  half  of  them  there  and  driven 
the  rest  back  into  Russia,  to  be  scattered  through 
the  villages  and  wheat-fields  of  the  lower  Volga. 

For  a  fortnight  we  had  been  sailing  down  the 
great  river  with  nothing  to  do  but  eat,  read  novels, 
and  watch  the  view.  More  than  a  thousand  miles, 
and  a  wall  of  sleeps  and  splendid  lazy  days,  shut 
us  away  from  the  west.  The  half-Asiatic  air  of 
Astrakhan  made  the  war  seem  even  farther.  And 
it  was  at  the  close  of  that  baking  day  that  we  were 
suddenly  brought  back  to  reality  when  a  big  hghter 
swam  alongside,  jammed  with  these  people  who 
had  not  forgotten  the  war  for  a  minute  since  they 
had  been  driven  from  their  homes  nearly  a  year 
before. 

They  were  a  remnant  of  that  other  "grand  army" 
which  dragged  eastward  across  Russia  under  con- 
ditions not  dissimilar  to  those  under  which  Napo- 
leon's much  smaller  army  retreated  from  Moscow. 
Everybody  has  his  picture  of  that — snow,  crows, 
broken  limbers,  frozen  men  and  horses — the  last 
of  the  half  million  that  marched  to  conquer  Russia 
and  staggered  back,  a  scant  twelve  thousand,  across 
the  Niemen.  But  of  the  retreat  of  this  civilian 
army,  comparatively  little  is  known  in  the  west. 
It  was  forgotten  in  the  other  excitements  of  the 

207 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

war,  and  for  us,  particularly,  iii  the  nearness  and 
understandableness  of  Belgium.  Perhaps  the  easiest 
way  for  Americans  to  summarize  the  story  is  to 
imagine  it  in  terms  of  Belgium — imagine  all  the 
Belgian  "ifs"  really  come  true — ij  there  had  been 
little  or  no  organized  relief,  if,  instead  of  living  in 
densely  populated  western  Europe,  the  Belgians  had 
been  uprooted  and  strewn  across  a  comparatively 
empty  continent. 

When  Antwerp  fell  it  was  only  a  few  hours'  walk 
to  the  Dutch  frontier.  England  and  France,  with 
every  sort  of  modem  charitable  machinery,  were 
but  a  few  days  away.  Even  those  who  remained 
behind  had  at  least  their  own  roofs  to  cover  them 
and  various  sorts  of  rehef,  presently,  including  our 
own.  The  Russian  refugees  were  in  an  utterly  dif- 
ferent situation.  Driven  from  their  homes,  they 
journeyed  for  weeks  sometimes  under  conditions 
not  tmlike  those  faced  by  our  own  forty-niners, 
and  then,  loaded  into  cattle-cars,  were  distributed 
through  regions  which  might  be  compared  to  Mon- 
tana or  British  Columbia  in  winter. 

There  were  still  echoes  of  it  in  Petrograd  and 
Moscow — ^how  the  trains  jammed  with  people,  al- 
ready weakened  by  weeks  of  tramping  and  lack  of 
food,  started  across  Russia  in  winter,  dropping 
handfuls  along  the  way.  Fifty  would  be  assigned 
to  this  station,  a  hundred  to  that.     Doors  were 

208 


VOLGA    REFUGEES 

opened,  the  number  counted  off,  the  train  started 
again.  Sometimes  families  kept  together,  some- 
times not.  There  were  all  sorts  of  illnesses  on  these 
trains,  paralyzed  old  women  lying  in  the  cold  for 
days,  unable  to  move.  Hands  and  feet  were  frozen; 
people  died  where  they  lay.  These  things  happened, 
not  because  anybody  willed  it  or  wished  it,  but 
because  there  was  no  plan,  no  means  to  carry  out 
a  plan  if  there  had  been  one — ^no  other  way. 

The  beginnings  of  this  flight  of  civilian  fugitives 
I  had  seen  myself  the  year  before  as  we  followed 
the  advancing  Austro-Hungarian  army  up  into 
Brest-Litovsk.  All  one  day  we  drove  past  a  line 
of  peasant  carts — ^peasants  just  like  these  now 
meeting  us  at  Astrakhan,  but  sifted  through  the 
militaiy  net  somehow — creaking  past  us,  westward, 
back  to  their  homes.  Brest-Litovsk  itself,  a  city 
of  fifty  thousand,  was  merely  smoking  walls,  and 
all  those  people  were  scattered  somewhere  over 
behind  that  curtain  of  dust  and  smoke  in  the  east. 

With  them,  as  it  happened,  was  the  Moscow 
joumahst  Doroshevitch,  whose  story,  written  in 
his  curious  style,  eveiy  phrase  a  separate  paragraph, 
bridges  the  gap  between  what  I  saw  then  and  was 
seeing  now  at  Astrakhan.  Doroshevitch  travelled 
westward  through  the  refugee  stream  at  just  about 
the  time  that  we  were  travelling  eastward.  I  wrote 
then  of  the  "dust  of  the  great  retreat,"  and  it  is 

209 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

almost  like  having  a  man  call  to  you  from  the  op- 
posite bank  of  the  river  to  find  him  writing  also  of 
the  dust,  of  "gray  carts  and  people,  like  visions  .  .  . 
dust  like  a  wall,  in  which  you  travel  as  in  smoke, 
as  in  a  dense  fog." 

There  was,  he  writes,  one  plan — fugitives  were 
to  be  forced  to  go  as  far  as  they  could  with  their 
own  horses.  The  streams  were  shunted  down  this 
road,  down  that,  until,  finally,  trains  could  take 
up  the  remnant  and  carry  it  farther  east.  Under 
their  dust-clouds  these  streams  pushed  slowly  east- 
ward, consuming  everything,  like  locusts.  They 
cut  trees  for  fire,  dug  up  the  peasants'  potatoes; 
where  they  had  passed  there  was  not  even  grass 
left.  Their  carts  were  piled  and  himg  with  the 
strangest  things — sometimes  they  would  be  carry- 
ing nothing  but  an  iron  roof,  the  most  valuable 
thing  they  could  bring  away. 

Ojten  behind  tJie  carts  is  tied  oji  a  Viennese  chair. 

They  had  been  proud  of  this  chair. 

— It  had  been  their  chair  for  quests. 

—  They  didn't  get  along  anyhow  in  their  home.  They  had 
Viennese  chairs.     Theirs  wasn't  an  izba. 

And  now  when  they  sleep  in  the  woods  and  travel  slowly  along 
the  road  in  cold  and  hunger  they  carry  these  chairs  with  them 
as: 

Their  most  precious  possession.  .  .  .  Suddenly  amid  the 
gray  lines  are  seen — bright  patches. 

Peasant  women  came  along  in  bright  new  sliawls. 

210 


VOLGA    REFUGEES 

Ornamental,  sumjpiuous.  .  .  .  With  such  tired  and  mourn- 
ful faces  and  yet  dressed  in  their  festival  clothes.  .  .  .  This 
is  the  most  dreadful  of  all. 

These  people  have  come  to  the  very  last. 

Everything  else  has  been  worn  out;  it  has  all  gone  to  rags, 
changed  to  tatters. 

And  at  the  last  stopping-place  the  peasant  woman  has  taken 
out  of  her  box,  or  from  the  bottom  of  some  little  tub,  her  best 
clothes  which  she  has  hidden  there  till  then.  .  .  .  The  very 
last. 

To  the  last,  too,  they  kept  their  horses.  A  horse 
was  a  sign  of  respectability.  That  gone,  they  were 
nothing.  The  government  bought  horses  at  cer- 
tain places,  and  these  stations  were  crowded  with 
them — tired  horses  trying  to  pick  up  a  little  grass 
from  the  trampled  ground.  These  stations  were 
littered,  too,  with  abandoned  carts,  the  iron  parts 
taken  away,  wheels  lying  separately.  There  were 
thousands  of  them — the  plain  was  gray  with  carts. 

A  farmer  whose  cattle  had  been  drowned  in  one 
of  the  Minsk  marshes,  when  a  sudden  order  had 
come  to  clear  the  road,  had  saved  one  horse — "a 
little  shaggy  horse,  ten  years  old,  but  active.  In 
Roslavl  a  man  permitted  him  to  live  in  his  bath- 
house. He  was  going  to  stay  there  with  his  horse 
and  drive  a  cab."  In  Saratov  I  myself  ran  across 
just  such  a  man.  He  drove  me  across  town  from 
the  station  and  confided,  in  the  quaint,  talkative 
way  of  the  Russian  izvoschik,  that  he  was  a  refugee 

211 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

from  Warsaw.  Many  of  the  cabmen  with  whom 
one  wi'angled  in  Moscow  and  Petrograd  very  likely 
had  similar  histories  and  before  the  war  farms  of 
their  own. 

There  were  relief  stations,  but  they  were  a  drop 
in  the  bucket — a  pail  of  milk  sometimes  for  a  regi- 
ment of  hungry  babies.  The  fugitives,  sleeping  on 
the  ground,  where  they  sometimes  scorched  their 
bare  feet  overnight  with  their  own  fires,  drinking 
any  sort  of  water,  li\dng  on  half-cooked  vegetables, 
came  down  with  all  sorts  of  diseases.  There  were 
typhoid,  rheumatism,  dysentery;  among  the  chil- 
dren scarlatina. 

In  a  sort  of  panic  fear  of  being  lost  the  people 
from  different  neighborhoods  tried  to  keep  to- 
gether, yet  continually  were  separated.  A  man 
went  to  wait  in  a  bread  line,  and  his  friends  forgot 
him.  A  mother  got  off  the  train  to  fill  her  tea- 
kettle from  the  hot-water  tank,  which  is  a  fixture 
at  every  Russian  station,  and  the  train  went  off 
without  her.  In  the  American  creche  in  Petro- 
grad I  saw  a  Httle  boy  who  had  been  lost  in  just 
that  way.  There  was  another  at  the  embassy — 
a  droll,  solenrn,  soft-hearted  youngster  who  spent 
his  spare  time  copying  head-lines  out  of  the  Amer- 
ican newspapers.  He  couldn't  understand  a  word 
of  English,  but  would  carefully  copy  the  letters 
and  then  bring  you  the  paper  with  somewhat  the 

212 


VOLGA    REFUGEES 

pleased  air  with  which  a  dog  will  lay  at  your  feet 
something  he  has  dug  up. 

They  were  trying  to  make  him  useful  and  sent 
him  one  day  with  a  letter  to  the  branch  office  a 
few  blocks  away.  The  letter  did  not  arrive,  and 
they  found  he  had  given  it  to  the  policeman  on 
the  corner.  The  first  sight  of  that  long,  brown 
coat  and  sword  had  overpowered  him,  and  he  had 
turned  over  the  letter  at  once. 

There  must  be  hundreds,  thousands  of  such 
cases.  No  records  to  go  to,  little  chance  of  tracing 
them  until  the  war  is  over.  The  fear  of  being  left 
behind  pursued  them  even  with  their  sick  and  dead. 

They  do  not  bury,  but: 

— Dig  holes  for  the  dead,  as  the  peasants  say. 

— Because  it  is  without  the  requiem  hymn.  Surely  such 
an  act  is  not  a  burial. 

hi  the  daytime,  at  the  stopping-places,  at  the  relief  and  med- 
ical points,  they: 

— Conceal  their  corpses,  fearing  that  they  may  be  delayed 
by  formalities: 

— and  remain  behind  ! 

They  carry  out  the  corpses  from  the  forest  where  they  have 
spent  the  night  arid  bring  them  to  the  road. 

They  must  bury  them  in  a  place  where  the  people  pass  by. 

— Where  man  coming  past  will  cross  himself  and  pray  for 
the  soul  of  the  departed.  For,  you  see,  the  dead  have  not  had 
their  due  singing  and  prayers  as  at  a  proper  funeral  service. 

All  along  the  road  were  crosses.  And  always 
they  tried  to  put  them  in  the  most  beautiful  places. 

213 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

They  put  up  a  little  fence  or  covered  the  grave 
with  pine  branches,  or  stuck  a  single  branch  in  the 
earth,  or  tied  on  the  crosses  embroidered  belts,  or 
clean  white  towels  with  embroidered  ends. 

Others  see: 

— That  it  is  a  nice  place. 

And  lay  their  own  dead  with  the  others,  side  by  side. 
And  yet  more  come,  and  yet  more. 

And  the  cemetery  grows,  stretching  itself  out  along  the  margin 
of  the  road. 

The  peasants  in  the  country  through  which  the 
refugees  passed  gave,  meanwhile,  everything  they 
could.  You  need  it  more  than  we  do,  they  said — 
what's  the  difference? — nitchevo.  And  in  the  fugi- 
tives themselves  was  seen  that  patience,  cheerful- 
ness, and  faith  which  seems  the  support  of  all  people 
in  such  times.  It  is  as  if  those  who  reach  the  bottom 
and  lose  everything  feel  somehow  freed. 

Some  Polish  women  are  carrying  on  wooden  stands  large 
pictures  of  the  Mother  of  God,  all  in  dark  ribbons,  hung  with 
branches  of  evergreen,  adorned  icith  icithered  flowers. 

They  can-y  the  ikons  the  whole  road,  hundreds  of  versts,  in 
the  hands. 

They  go  forward  as  if  seeing  nothing  in  front  of  them. 

As  if  they  felt  no  tiredness  whatever. 

In  a  sort  of  broken  ecstasy. 

As  if  they  were  going  to  heaven. 

And,  never  ceasing,  loudly  they  sing. 

They  do  not  complain,  but  give  praise. 

214 


VOLGA   REFUGEES 

Bit  by  bit  the  streams  decreased.  Moscow, 
Kiev,  Petrograd  swallowed  their  thousands,  vil- 
lages tens  and  scores.  The  rest  pushed  on  east- 
ward across  the  Urals,  into  Siberia  and  Turkestan. 
The  great  Russian  plain  soaked  them  up  at  last 
except  where  some  such  barrier  as  the  typhus  epi- 
demic in  Tashkend  drove  them  back  again. 

The  lighter  eased  up  to  the  pier,  and  the  people 
— ^peasant  mothers  and  children  for  the  most  part, 
with  a  few  wrinkled  old  hags  and  able-bodied  men 
— ^pushed  on  to  the  dock  with  their  aimless,  hurried 
air  of  driven  cattle.  Already,  somebody  said,  they 
had  been  a  month  on  the  way.  Nearly  every  one, 
even  the  old  women  and  small  boys,  staggered 
under  a  bundle  almost  as  big  as  himself.  Behind 
them  came  their  gendarme  escort  cariying  the  big, 
cart-wheel  loaves  of  black  peasant  bread.  This 
was  the  ration  carried  with  them,  the  government 
allowance.  Each,  it  was  said,  was  supposed  to 
receive  twenty  kopecks — ^about  ten  cents — a  day 
for  his  keep,  paid,  during  such  a  migration,  in 
bread.    There  was  nothing  else — only  black  bread. 

They  were  shunted  down  the  gangway  to  the 
steamboat's  lower  deck,  where  they  filled  the  steer- 
age quarters,  the  deck  space  forward  and  aft,  and 
the  passageway  round  the  engines.  Alongside, 
meanwhile,  came  the  little  transport  which  had 
ferried  them  across  the  Caspian,  and  up  from  its 

215 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

hold  and  down  into  ours  began  to  tumble  their 
luggage.  These  were  the  last  things,  solid  things 
that  survive  after  the  horse  is  sold  and  the  cat 
and  dog  left  behind,  broken-off  bits  of  homes. 

The  Persian  roustabouts,  handsome,  sweating 
fellows,  shot  them  down  the  slide  regardless — a 
battered  wash-board,  enamelled  kettles,  chests  they 
could  scarcely  lift.  A  clumsy  peasant's  shovel, 
home-made  evidently,  the  earth  still  caked  on  it, 
clattered  down  the  side.  With  that  weapon  some 
man  had  set  out  to  face  the  world. 

The  passengers,  who  had  had  nothing  to  do  all 
day  but  kill  time  and  keep  cool,  looked  down  with 
interest,  and  a  certain  disapproval.  One  lady, 
franker  than  most,  said  that  it  wasn't  quite  right 
for  the  company  to  put  these  people  on  the  steamer. 
It  made  one  uncomfortable  with  one's  own  com- 
fort, and,  after  all,  we  had  paid  our  money  and 
were  on  a  pleasure-trip.  The  stuff  was  soon  aboard, 
however;  the  steamer  turned  its  nose  up-stream, 
the  cool  breeze  again  swept  the  deck,  and  the  dis- 
turbing guests  were  forgotten  for  the  time  in  the 
more  intense  preoccupation  of  dinner. 

It  was  well  along  in  the  evening  and  dark  when 
I  went  below.  One  opened  a  door  and  stepped 
from  the  cool  and  playful  leisure  of  the  passenger 
deck  into  a  sort  of  inferno.  The  air  was  stifling 
with  heat  and  the  smell  of  oil  and  unwashed  hu- 

216 


Refugees  with  their  packs  leaving  the  steamer  in  which  they  had  been  brought 

across  the  Caspian. 


After  landing  across  the  river  from  Saratov — ^waiting  for  the  train. 


VOLGA    REFUGEES 

manity.  Electric  lamps  blazed  all  over  the  place, 
the  engines  hissed  and  pounded,  and  in  this  heat 
and  noise  the  people,  packed  so  that  you  could 
scarcely  avoid  stepping  on  them,  were  trjdng  to 
quiet  squalling  babies,  arranging  and  rearranging 
their  wretched  bmidles  in  the  effort  to  get  something 
soft  to  lie  upon  or  achieve  a  little  privacy,  or,  lost 
to  everything,  sprawled  on  their  backs  asleep  with 
unconscious  faces  turned  up  to  the  blazing  lamps. 
A  baby  with  rickets  lay  in  a  little  wooden  trough, 
a  sort  of  wash-dish  or  chopping-bowl,  whining  and 
twisting.  The  mother,  a  frail-looking  woman  with 
a  sweet,  patient  face,  kept  rocking  the  little  trough. 
It  was  no  use — the  baby  kept  on  crying.  She  lifted 
it — its  helpless  legs  dangled  Hke  sticks — and  tried 
to  nurse  it.    But  still  it  cried. 

There  was  no  milk  for  any  of  the  babies — ^noth- 
ing but  the  soggy  black  bread.  Some  of  them  sat 
up,  picking  at  chunks  of  it  or  at  bits  of  sausage 
with  their  little  blue  fingers — ^listlessly,  as  if  it  were 
only  some  instinctive  working  of  their  muscles. 

On  his  knees  in  the  engine  passageway  an  old 
man  was  praying.  His  eyes  were  fixed  on  the  ikon 
on  the  opposite  wall — the  ikon  always  found  even 
in  such  pubhc  places,  in  your  hotel  room,  in  rail- 
road waiting-rooms — and  from  time  to  time  he 
crossed  himself  with  the  Russian's  wide,  rhythmic 
gesture,  and  bowed  till  his  forehead  touched  the 

217 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

floor.  Lips  moving,  his  eyes  strained  toward  the 
sacred  image,  in  a  sort  of  trance,  as  if  he  looked 
clear  through  the  incredible,  intolerable  present,  to 
paradise  itself. 

Others  in  the  crowd  were  on  their  knees,  facing 
the  ikon  and  bowing  and  crossing  themselves.  And 
that  cry  of  Dostoyevski's,  "Are  we  worth  it !"  some- 
how came  back  to  one's  mind.  What,  after  all, 
had  these  people  done? 

At  home  they  would  at  least  be  going  somewhere. 
There  would  be  relief  up  ahead,  smiling,  capable, 
kindly  women  with  coffee  and  sandwiches,  milk  for 
the  babies,  blankets,  and  places  to  get  clean.  Just 
such  smiling,  kindly  women  were  in  every  town  we 
passed,  glad  to  help  if  they  had  known,  or  there 
had  been  any  machinery  for  helping.  Individual 
Russians  are  the  kindest  people.  But  there  was 
no  such  machinery:  people  are  used  to  having 
things  happen  in  which  they  are  not  consulted. 
Down  from  above,  from  that  impersonal,  far-reach- 
ing power,  whose  very  severity  was  thought  neces- 
sary to  hold  this  vast,  loose,  easy-going  mass  to- 
gether, had  come  an  order.  So-and-so  ...  to  such 
and  such  a  place.  .  .  .  And  they  moved  on — ^just 
as  millions  have  gone  on  in  Russia  in  the  past,  and 
nobody  knew. 

I  went  on  deck.  People  sang  at  the  piano, 
chatted  in  the  dusk,  leaned  on  the  rail  aft,  looking 

218 


VOLGA   REFUGEES 

down  at  the  figures  asleep  by  the  stern.  It  was  as 
if  miles  instead  of  inches  separated  them,  as  if, 
for  those  calm  faces  turned  up  to  the  stars,  these 
people  looking  down  did  not  exist.  Body  to  body, 
as  close  as  they  could  lie,  they  slept.  An  old  man 
with  a  thin  hawk  face  lay  with  mouth  wide  open; 
children  curled  up  like  puppies  in  the  curve  of  their 
mother's  bodies;  a  woman  lay  on  her  husband's 
arm,  her  waist,  unfastened,  sKpped  away  from  a 
firm,  white  breast. 

Next  morning  a  collection  was  taken  up;  the 
purser  found  milk  at  one  of  the  stations,  and  the 
baby  with  the  rickets  had  something  inside  of  him 
at  once,  at  any  rate.  Looking  down  from  the  upper 
deck,  we  could  see,  during  that  day  and  the  next, 
what  expert  gypsies  they  had  become.  There  was 
nothing  the  mothers  could  not  dig  out  of  those 
bimdles.  Cups  and  spoons,  a  clean  waist,  precious 
bits  of  sugar  wrapped  in  a  handkerchief,  yam,  and 
needles.  Nearly  every  one  had  some  sort  of  jar 
or  bottle  filled  with  water  and  chopped-up  cucum- 
bers, which  served,  apparently,  as  a  sort  of  relish 
and  drink  together,  to  wash  down  the  soggy,  black 
bread.  When  the  children  cried  they  got  a  few 
spoonfuls  of  this  water,  or  a  bit  of  cucumber  to 
chew  on.  And,  though  an  almost  tropical  sun  beat 
down,  the  fingers  of  most  of  the  women  kept  flying 
— ^knitting,    knitting — socks    and    mittens.     They 

219 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

worked  with  the  frantic  haste  of  soldiers  digging 
themselves  in.  And  indeed  they  were  digging  them- 
selves in,  against  the  second  winter  they  soon  would 
have  to  fight. 

A  tall,  straight;  fine-looking  girl  leaned  on  the 
rail,  arms  folded  and  back  to  the  river.  Now  and 
then  her  eyes  met  those  of  another,  slightly  older 
woman  with  children,  apparently  her  sister,  and  a 
flash  of  understanding,  a  quick,  vague  smile,  went 
between  the  two.  Back  in  Poland  somewhere,  one 
fancied,  these  two  had  come  from  rather  different 
homes  than  the  rest.  With  other  clothes  the  tall 
girl  might  have  been  "almost  anybody."  What 
becomes  of  girls  like  that — ordered  from  place  to 
place  across  a  continent,  "absorbed"  by  some  vil- 
lage or  town  along  the  river?  She  looked,  as  she 
stared  ahead  of  her,  paying  as  little  attention  to 
her  companions  as  to  those  on  the  upper  deck,  as 
if  it  might  be  all  one  to  her  now.  She  would  yield 
to  circumstances  or  stab  some  one  in  the  back  with 
the  same  sort  of  disdain. 

In  another  part  of  the  deck  a  group  of  Polish 
peasants.  Catholics  instead  of  the  usual  Orthodox, 
sat  together,  singing  over  and  over  out  of  much- 
thumbed  books,  their  church  hymns.  Outlandish 
rag-dolls  came  out  of  those  miraculous  packs,  and 
children  began  to  dress  and  put  them  to  bed  and 
feed  them  with  the  food  which  they  could  imagine, 

220 


VOLGA    REFUGEES 

if  they  did  not  have  it  themselves.  Fathers  and 
mothers  gathered  about  the  childi'en:  that  partic- 
ular square  yard  of  deck  belonged  to  them — that 
was  their  home. 

I  was  awakened  early  the  third  morning  by  shout- 
ing and  trampling.  We  were  tied  up  on  the  east 
bank  across  from  Saratov,  and  the  refugees  were 
going  ashore.  Slipping  into  boots  and  overcoat, 
I  hurried  out.  We  were  south  of  the  "white  nights," 
but  the  sun  rose  early,  nevertheless,  and  although 
only  four  o'clock,  the  meadow  and  woods  above 
the  bank  were  already  sparkHng  in  the  brightness 
of  another  summer  morning.  Half  the  people  were 
already  up  the  bank  arranging  their  packs  by  the 
railroad-track,  ready  for  the  train  that  some  time 
or  other  would  be  coming  along. 

Again  the  chests,  kettles,  and  wash-tubs  were 
coming  out  of  the  hold — ^hit  or  miss.  There  were 
no  porters  to  take  them,  and  women  and  children, 
driven  by  the  old  fear  of  being  left  behind,  snatched 
theii"  pieces  as  they  came,  and  di-agged  and  pushed 
them  up  the  bank.  One  woman  screamed  and  beat 
her  breast  at  the  tall,  calm  gendarme  who  was 
watching  the  baggage  come  ashore. 

Something  was  lost,  evident^ — the  last  thing 
perhaps.  But  where?  On  the  Caspian  steamer, 
on  the  Turkestan  railroad — it  might  as  well  have 
been  on  the  other  side  of  the  earth.    The  gendarme 

221 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

listened  sympathetically,  nodded,  and  shrugged  his 
shoulders.  Such  things  happen  on  such  pilgrimages, 
but  what  can  one  do — nitchevo ! 

Along  the  track,  on  the  grass  still  drenched  with 
dew,  little  family  groups  began  to  coagulate  again 
as  instinctively  as  spiders  rebuild  their  webs.  There 
was  nothing  to  eat  except  what  might  still  be  dis- 
covered in  those  miraculous  bundles,  no  one  to 
meet  them  or  to  tell  when  the  train  would  come 
or  where  it  was  going. 

It  was  good,  at  any  rate,  after  those  hideous 
nights  in  the  engine-room,  to  be  loose  in  the  beau- 
tiful morning.  The  children  ran  into  it  with  their 
blessed  gift  of  forgetting.  In  a  minute  they  were 
all  over  the  place,  picking  flowers,  discovering  all 
sorts  of  marvels,  pushing  sticks  into  the  pond. 

The  boat  whistled,  and  we  started  up-stream 
again.  By  the  time  the  passengers  were  awake 
and  ringing  desperately  for  their  coffee  the  sun 
was  high,  and  all  these  little  specks  of  human  drift- 
wood were  shut  away  behind  simny  stretches  of 
the  great  river.  Already  they  had  become  vague, 
as  things  so  easily  become  in  Russia,  where  the 
individual  is  dwarfed  by  the  background  across 
which  he  moves.  And  the  steamer  drove  cheer- 
fully northward  against  the  current  of  the  river, 
which,  whether  people  live  or  die,  rolls  on,  strong 
and  beautiful  and  young. 

222 


X 

RUMANIA  LEARNS  WHAT  WAR  IS 

Winter  was  already  in  the  air  and  in  people's 
thoughts  as  we  left  Petrograd.  Out  of  the  endless 
Baltic  rains  we  rolled  at  last,  down  past  Kiev,  on 
its  hills  beside  the  Dnieper,  and  into  the  south- 
western plains — tremendous  billows  of  wheat  and 
farm  land,  as  if  our  own  still  prairie-seas  were  under 
a  deep  ground-swell — ^just  short  of  Odessa,  at  a 
junction  full  of  troop-trains,  westward  through 
Bessarabia,  and  finally,  four  long  days  from  the 
Russian  capital,  over  the  frontier  into  Riunania 
and  back  to  the  sun  and  the  summer  again. 

Indian  summer,  at  an}  rate,  the  still,  soft,  golden 
southern  autumn — ^yellow  corn-fields,  plums  and 
pears,  and  grapes.  At  every  station  peasant  women 
were  selling  them — or,  indeed,  it  seemed,  after 
Petrograd  prices,  almost  giving  these  luxuries  away. 
Samovars  and  tea  were  gone,  and  the  heavy  black 
bread,  and  pastry  stuffed  with  boiled  cabbage; 
people  drank  coffee  now,  and  their  own  native 
wine.  These  Rumanian  peasants,  themselves,  with 
their  bright  embroidered  linen  and  dark,   gypsy 

223 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

eyes,  had,  after  the  shaggy  muzhiks  of  the  north, 
a  certain  southern  grace  and  Hghtness,  and  they, 
the  sun  and  fruit,  and  the  warm  hills,  covered  with 
villages  and  vineyards,  brought  almost  an  echo  of 
Italy  or  Spain. 

The  four  French  officers  who  had  come  all  the 
way  round  Em'ope  to  join  their  new  ally  began  to 
look  less  disconsolate. 

"This  is  a  country!"  said  one,  and  promptly 
dismissed  Russia,  of  which  he  had  seen  nothing 
but  a  Petrograd  hotel  at  its  most  dismal  season, 
as  no  place  at  all:  "Ce  n^est  pas  un  pays !" 

I  had  come  to  Bucharest  before  from  western 
Europe,  hurried  down  from  Predeal  in  the  dark, 
and,  like  most  foreigners,  was  chiefl}^  struck  with 
the  rather  flashy  light-mindedness  of  the  little 
capital.  This  way,  through  the  farm  lands,  one 
saw  quite  another  side  of  the  country— its  grace 
and  richness,  and,  travelling  down  the  long,  awk- 
ward arm  of  their  L-shaped  territory,  one  under- 
stood how  the  Rumanians  might  naturally  covet 
the  land  across  the  mountains  to  the  west — ^Transyl- 
vania— that  would  round  it  out  into  a  tidy  empire. 

There  was  but  one  train  a  day  now  for  the  whole 
north-and-south  length  of  Rumania,  a  long  string 
of  shabby,  unheated  day-coaches  instead  of  the 
wagons-lits  and  expresses  of  peace  times.  People 
boiled  up  on  the  platforms  at  every  station,  packed 

224 


RUMANIA 

coupes  aiid  corridore,  spread  out  on  the  roofs — 
all  Russia's  disorder  with  added  gesticulation  and 
vehemence.  During  the  waits  the  two  younger 
Frenchmen  in  the  new  light-blue  uniform  strolled 
on  the  platform,  the  centre  of  all  eyes.  One  wore 
the  tam-o'-shanter  of  the  French  Alpine  troops. 
Everj^hing  else  he  had  on,  even  his  soft  collar  and 
handkerchief,  was  light  blue,  and  in  his  blue  puttees 
he  looked,  in  contrast  with  the  Russians,  in  their 
long,  stiff  tan  overcoats,  almost  as  ready  for  golf 
as  for  war.  At  the  stations  the  day  before  herds 
of  Russian  soldiers — ^big,  wide-eyed,  devoted  chil- 
dren, like  moose  with  the  gift  of  speech  and  faith 
— ^had  stared  at  him,  awestmck,  wondering  what  he 
might  be,  and  hearing  with  slow,  incredulous  smiles, 
the  whisper :  ^ '  Franzuski ! ' ' 

The  other  two  were  sober  navy  men,  bringing  a 
lot  of  French  sailors,  and  the  elder,  as  we  stood  in 
the  packed  corridor,  began  to  talk,  as  perhaps  only 
a  Frenchman  would,  about  books.  He  had  not 
been  nearer  to  America  than  Havana,  but  he  knew 
Longfellow's  poems  and  liked  them.  Anatole 
France  wrote  beautiful  French,  but  the  soldier 
did  not  enjoy  him  because  "he  didn't  beHeve  in 
anything."  The  Germans,  strangely  enough,  had 
good  poets.  "They  say  of  us,"  he  smiled,  "that 
Frenchmen  can  write  of  the  surface  of  the  sea,  but 
can't  make  one  feel  the  pearl  underneath  the  waves. 

225 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

It  isn't  true — yet  one  knows  what  they're  trying 
to  say." 

Night  came,  but  there  were  no  hghts,  and,  packed 
in  the  dark,  we  jolted  on  without  them.  As  it  was 
almost  impossible  to  fight  one's  way  out  to  any- 
thing to  eat  at  the  stations  and  back  again  before 
the  train  started,  we  had  to  go  without  eating — 
it  was  three  in  the  morning  when  we  reached  Bucha- 
rest. The  station  was  dark,  the  town  dark.  Some- 
body said  that  a  Zeppelin  had  been  reported:  coming 
or  going,  we  were  too  sleepy  to  care.  There  were 
no  cabs,  and,  stumbling  through  black  streets  with 
gendarmes  squinting  suspiciously  at  eveiy  corner, 
we  were  glad  enough  to  find  at  last  a  hotel  porter 
awake  and  a  bed. 

I  was  out  again  shortly,  still  fired  by  the  unfa- 
mihar  sim,  and  walking  up  the  Galea  Vittorei — that 
narrow,  winding  stretch  of  asphalt,  quaintly  com- 
bining the  airs  of  a  great  capital  and  a  village  street, 
up  and  down  which,  in  peace  times,  patters  and 
sparkles  the  little  capital's  frivolous  life. 

I  recalled  it  as  it  used  to  be  at  five  in  the  after- 
noon, jammed  with  carriages  and  people,  smelling 
of  cigarettes  and  gasoline  smoke  and  women's  per- 
fumes, with  the  operatic  yomig  officers  ogling  from 
the  sidewalk  the  two  streams  of  victorias  rolling  by, 
each  with  its  enamelled  face  and  carmine  lips  under 
a  slanting  black  hat,  and  its  flash  of  silk  stockings. 

226 


Bargaining  for  grapes  in  a  Bucharest  street  with  a  httle  Rumanian 

peasant. 


A  typical  residence  street  in  Bucharest,  leading  off  the  Galea  Vittorei. 


RUMANIA 

Ammunition  was  going  through  to  Turkey  then, 
grain  and  oil  over  to  Austria,  and  across  the  foot- 
lights every  evening  Miss  Nita-Jo  was  gayly  asking 
what  the  prime  minister  was  going  to  do — and  no- 
body could  tell.  War  had  brushed  all  that  aside, 
and  now,  in  the  still,  fresh  morning,  along  the  al- 
most empty  sidewalk,  country  folk  in  sandals  and 
embroidered  homespim  were  shuffling  under  their 
heavy  panniers  of  fresh  prunes  and  amber-colored 
grapes.  Across  from  Capsa's,  the  little  pastry- 
shop  where  "everybody"  takes  tea  and  watches 
the  parade  in  peace  times,  the  sidewalk  was  roped 
off  and  a  sentry  guarded  the  entrance  of  the  Grand 
Hotel,  where  the  more  consequential  Austrian  and 
German  civihans  were  interned.  The  "High  Life" 
cafe,  where  the  war  used  to  be  fought  out  in  all 
the  languages  of  Europe  over  the  coffee-cups,  was 
closed,  like  most  of  the  cafes,  the  fatherly  police 
thinking  it  just  as  well  to  discourage  amateur  elo- 
quence until  the  chances  of  war  were  a  little  more 
certain.  The  royal  palace  near  by  had  already 
been  partly  turned  into  a  Red  Cross  hospital,  and 
as  I  passed  a  motor  drununed  in — the  young  Crown 
Prince,  in  imiform  now,  driving  his  own  car. 

I  walked  up  past  the  Athen^e  Palace  Hotel,  full 
of  officers  now — Rumanian,  French,  Italian,  Rus- 
sian— ^glanced  at  a  book-shop  window  full  of_French 
illustrated  papers  and  yellow-bound  French  novels, 

227 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

and  presently  turned  into  one  of  the  quiet  residence 
streets.  Here,  between  white-and-tan-colored  stucco 
houses  in  the  French  style,  where  sidewalks  skirted 
garden-walls  overhimg  by  chestnut-trees,  one  felt 
more  strongly  that  Latin  air  one  had  noticed  on 
crossing  the  frontier.  These  were  people  more 
concerned  than  Slavs  generally  are  with  the  graces 
and  gallantries  of  life.  Through  basement  win- 
dows one  caught  a  glimpse  now  and  then  of  a  man 
cook  in  a  white  cap,  or  looked  through  tall  iron 
gateways  toward  quiet  enclosed  gardens,  where 
carved  marble  benches  or  a  white  nymph  gleamed 
against  the  yellow  autumn  leaves. 

And  over  all  these  things  war  had  cast  its  sudden 
and  sinister  charm.  Bucharest  was  changed,  the 
rakish  coquette  was  a  human  being,  fighting  for  her 
life,  now,  in  the  universal  European  shipwreck. 
And,  however  drowsily  the  sunshine  lay  in  these 
pleasant  winding  streets,  one  remembered  that  the 
butterfly  officers  were  being  shot  at  now,  up  in  the 
Carpathians  or  down  in  the  Dobrudja,  and  thou- 
sands, perhaps  hundreds  of  thousands,  of  peasants 
must  be  killed  before  the  Galea  Vittorei  was  itself 
again. 

I  had  just  said  good-by  to  some  friends  with 
whom  I  had  been  lunching,  and  was  returning 
down-town  when,  suddenly,  a  gendarme  on  the 
next  corner  began  to  blow  his  whistle,  people  scat- 

228 


^        RUMANIA 

tered,  and  ahead,  over  the  centre  of  the  city,  cot- 
tony balls  of  shrapnel  began  to  pop  in  the  peaceful 
blue  sky.  Above  them  a  tiny  hawk  came  slowly 
sailing — then  another,  and  another — far  aloft  and 
half  transparent,  like  the  Httle  silver  fish  in  glass 
globes.  Slowly  they  swimg  round,  now  and  then 
flashing  a  wing  against  the  sun,  and  as  they  sailed, 
one  heard  above  the  pop  of  shrapnel  and  the  rat- 
tat-tat  of  machine-guns  the  hoarser  detonation  of 
exploding  bombs. 

Previous  adventures  had  made  me  somewhat 
bomb-shy,  and  with  due  endeavors  not  to  disturb 
the  admirable  sang-froid  of  the  housemaids  and 
others  who  were  gazing  upward  with  shaded  eyes, 
I  promptly  began  a  rather  crab-like  progress  toward 
the  remoter  streets.  Here  it  was  quiet  enough,  but 
when  I  entered  the  hotel  half  or  three-quarters  of 
an  hour  later,  one  of  the  porters,  looking  as  if  he 
had  seen  a  ghost,  drew  a  finger  significantly  across 
his  throat,  and  muttered  that  one  hundred  and 
fifty  people  had  been  killed  in  the  post-office. 

This  was  not  true,  but  so  people  talked  in  Bu- 
charest during  the  next  three  days.  A  bomb  had, 
as  a  matter  of  fact,  fallen  in  the  busy  street  behind 
the  central  telegraph-office.  It  had  blown  in  all 
the  windows  of  the  offices  for  a  block  on  either  side, 
killed  several  and  injured  many.  The  communique 
admitted,  as  the  result  of  all  the  bombs  thrown  that 

229 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

afternoon,  some  seventy-five  killed  and  wounded — 
private  estimates  were  higher. 

The  streets  about  the  telegraph-office  were  closed 
and  guarded  by  gendarmes  when  I  got  there,  am- 
bulances were  whizzing  up  the  Galea  Vittorei,  and 
the  whole  down-town  of  Bucharest  was  unstrung. 
The  raiders  had  flown  away,  but  the  cry  that  they 
were  returning  kept  reappearing  all  that  afternoon. 
At  each  alarm — and  they  flew  back  and  forth  like 
wind-squalls  across  a  pond — the  first  gendarme  who 
heard  it  would  blow  on  his  whistle  a  demoniacal 
"Wh&-ee-ee-eel!"  The  man  on  the  next  comer 
took  it  up,  and  so  on  down  the  street  until,  in  a 
few  seconds,  you  could  hear  those  whistles  rising 
and  falling — the  most  dismal  sound  imaginabi 


15  V±±^^      iiiWOU      vxXKjxx^c*^      ►jwi^^v*      ^x^c*^* 

all  over  Bucharest.  At  the  first  whistle  iron  shutters 
came  banging  down,  people  ducked  in  wherever 
they  happened  to  be — there  was  a  fine  for  refusing 
such  hospitality — and  in  a  few  minutes  the  street 
would  be  empty  but  for  the  hapless  policemen  at 
the  comers  whistling  and  scanning  the  sky. 

Boy  scouts,  adding  to  the  enthusiasm  any  boys 
would  feel  at  such  a  time  all  the  operatic  instincts 
of  their  Rumanian  blood,  went  streaking  up  the 
Galea  Vittorei  humped  over  their  handle-bars,  red 
bandannas  flying,  whistling  as  they  rode,  and  now 
and  then  coming  up  behind  one  with  a  sudden 
shriek   that   would   have   made   a   hippopotamus 

230 


RUMANIA 

jump.  They  clung  to  ambulances  and  army-trucks, 
and  tiny  youngsters,  with  a  truly  Latin  aplomb, 
jumped  on  the  steps  of  other  people's  carriages 
and  peremptorily  waving  young  and  old  off  the 
streets,  rolled  out  in  their  shrill  soprano  voices  that 
the  "aeropldn'^  was  coming  and  people  must  get 
into  their  "casas.^' 

One  huge  motor-truck  pressed  into  service  as 
an  ambulance  was  fairly  sprinkled  with  Red  Cross 
volunteers  and  boy  scouts.  A  nurse  in  uniform 
perched  on  the  driver's  seat  with  two  tense-faced 
young  men,  one  of  whom  hung  on  to  the  wheel  and 
the  other  to  her,  and  with  horn  and  whistles  shriek- 
ing, motor  smoke  and  bandannas  in  the  wind,  this 
terrifying  chariot  boomed  up  and  down  the  street, 
scattering  everything  before  it.  It  was  droll,  and 
it  was  tragic,  that  afternoon,  and,  after  all  the  past 
two  years  had  brought,  filled  with  an  inexpressible 
irony — how  much  they  had  yet  to  learn  before 
they,  too,  would  take  war  as  a  matter  of  course, 
and  ambulances  be  no  more  than  grocer's  wagons 
or  trolley-cars ! 

There  was  not  a  Hght  in  Bucharest  that  night 
except  a  few  street-lamps  veiled  in  blue  globes. 
The  merest  glimmer  brought  a  bellow  from  the 
street.  I  dined  with  friends  in  a  little  house  backed 
up  against  another  wall,  but  the  lamp  was  no  sooner 
lit  than  a  policeman  was  barking  at  the  windows. 

231 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

We  put  shawls  and  blankets  over  the  curtams  and 
finally  had  to  put  the  lamp  on  the  floor  with  a  news- 
paper screen  around  it  to  satisfy  him.  My  hotel 
room  had  a  closed  Venetian  blind,  two  closed  win- 
dows, the  inner  one  covered  with  blue  paper  and  a 
curtain  inside  of  that.  Leaving  the  blind  closed, 
I  had  opened  the  window  the  merest  crack  and 
started  to  read  in  bed,  when  a  gendarme  and  the 
hotel  porter  came  galloping  up-stairs  to  smash  into 
the  room  as  if  the  place  were  on  fire. 

No  one  was  supposed  to  walk  abroad  after  ten 
without  a  permit  from  the  prefect  of  police — a 
gentleman  of  such  charming  manner,  by  the  way, 
that  it  was  a  pleasure  to  be  compelled  to  ask  favors 
of  him — and  the  mere  return  home  after  dark,  in- 
cluding finding  the  door,  like  a  secret  panel,  in  the 
bare,  black  face  of  one's  hotel,  had  its  touch  of 
melodrama. 

I  was  awakened  in  the  middle  of  the  night  rather 
slowly  to  become  aware  that  the  whistles  were  wail- 
ing as  they  had  wailed  that  afternoon.  These  dis- 
mal pipings,  rising  and  falling  out  of  the  night,  are, 
at  such  an  hour,  with  perhaps  only  one  story  be- 
tween you  and  prospective  bombs,  decidedly  en- 
livening. You  pop  out  of  bed  like  a  jack-in-a-box, 
throw  on  an  overcoat,  try  to  lace  up  shoes  without 
turning  on  the  light,  and  with  people  scurrying 
along  the  hallway  and  shrapnel  banging  overhead, 

232 


RUMANIA 

it  is  quite  easy  to  believe  that  the  enemy  is,  by 
now,  sailing  squarely  over  the  hotel.  If  it  is  only 
an  aeroplane,  the  bomb  will  probably  go  through 
the  roof,  explode  on  the  attic  floor,  blow  that  and 
the  floor  below  pretty  well  to  pieces,  and  perhaps 
send  only  a  few  fragments  through  the  next — with 
a  couple  of  stories  overhead,  you  are  probably  all 
right.  With  a  Zeppelin,  on  the  other  hand,  and 
five  hundred  pounds  of  high  explosives  falling  for 
a  mile  or  two,  anything  may  happen. 

All  these  things  go  scuttUng  through  one's  head, 
along  with  a  really  very  entertaining  sense  of  ad- 
venture, and  the  notion  one  generally  has  that  until 
things  actually  happen,  they  are  going  to  happen  to 
somebody  else.  And  so  presently,  with  a  becoming 
air  of  indifference  and  composure,  one  descends  to 
the  first-floor  hall,  where  the  guests,  wrapped  in 
overcoats  and  bath-robes,  look  as  if  the  ship  was 
sinking  and  they  were  just  ready  to  take  to  the 
boats.  So  people  huddled  all  over  Bucharest  that 
night,  according  to  their  temperament  and  situa- 
tion— from  families  squatting  dismally  in  the  cellars 
of  their  one-story  houses,  to  the  comparatively 
careless  guests  of  the  Athen^e  Palace,  able  to  con- 
tinue, in  the  interesting  atmosphere  of  darkened 
corridors,  flirtations  begun  the  evening  before. 

The  Zeppelin  had  disappeared  by  the  time  I 
got  into  the  street  where  a  few  hardy  souls  gazed, 

233 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

whispering,  at  a  sky  full  of  frosty  stars.  Hiding 
one's  feelings  not  being  their  fashion,  people  here 
could  make  more  of  such  experiences  than  they 
did  in  London,  perhaps,  where  it  was  the  fashion  to 
assume,  under  such  circumstances,  that  nothing  was 
happening  at  all.  A  few  nights  later,  for  example, 
when  no  Zeppelin  came,  although  the  whistles  had 
hurried  us  down-stairs  as  usual,  a  Rumanian  officer 
began  addressing  me  with  great  vehemence.  I 
told  him  that  I  didn't  understand  Rumanian. 

"I  was  saying,"  he  continued  in  French  with  the 
same  air  of  defying  dispute — "I  was  saying  that 
there  will  be  another  list  of  dead  and  wounded  to- 
night— encore  des  morts  et  blesses  !" 

I  suggested  that  possibly  they  wouldn't  come, 
after  all.  "Do  you  mean  to  say,  monsieur,"  he 
cried,  "that  the  guardians  of  our  city  are  doing 
this  to  amuse  themselves ! "  .  .  . 

With  temperaments  so  prone  to  excitement, 
there  was  obviously  not  much  sleep  for  anybody 
in  Buchai'est  that  night,  and  we  were  just  blink- 
ing over  coffee  next  morning  when  '^Whe-ee-ee- 
ed — "  .  .  .  the  whistles  were  at  it  again ! 

Aeroplanes  this  time — "those  white  birds  which 
profane  the  sign  of  the  cross,"  as  one  of  the  papers 
said,  and  more  bombs.  This  sort  of  thing,  espe- 
cially in  a  city  of  one-story  houses,  gets  on  one's 
nerves  after  a  time.  There  was  another  raid  that 
afternoon — there  were  ten  in  sixty  hours,  aeroplanes 

234 


RUMANIA 

by  day  and  a  Zeppelin  at  night — and  one  had  scarcely 
settled  down  from  the  last  before  the  whistling  for 
the  next  began. 

A  trifle  more  alert  the  second  night,  I  was  out 
and  in  the  street  betimes  and  saw  the  Zeppelin, 
supported,  as  it  were,  on  search-light  beams,  a  beau- 
tiful, half-transparent  monster,  like  a  great  pearl 
pencil,  sailing  steadily  and  unwinking  across  the 
town.  Showing  nothing  to  connect  it  with  the 
every-day  earth,  it  was  quite  a  creature  of  another, 
more  mysterious,  world,  and  it  was  odd  to  think, 
standing  there  in  the  Bucharest  street,  with  people 
talking  French  or  Rumanian,  that  up  there  were 
other  every-day  men  like  ourselves,  with  their 
own  intense,  little  local  life,  speaking  another  lan- 
guage, thinking  other  thoughts — worried,  practical 
men,  busy  with  wheels,  rudders,  speaking-tubes, 
and  so  on,  to  whom  we  were  only  an  abstraction, 
a  dull-glowing  patch  on  the  flat  earth's  map. 

Abstractions  though  we  were,  the  raiders  made 
several  rather  uncanny  hits.  One  bomb  smashed 
a  house  directly  across  the  street  from  that  of  the 
Russian  military  attache,  three  fell  close  to  Take 
lonesco's  house,  and  one  struck  the  httle  one-stoiy 
villa  in  which  the  British  military  attache  and  his 
aide  were  sleeping.  This  house  was  L-shaped,  three 
rooms,  with  a  drawing-room  at  the  corner  and 
bedroom  at  either  end.  The  bomb  struck  the  cornice 
of  the  corner  room,  smashed  the  front  wall,  the 

235 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

room  itself,  and  blew  fragments  through  the  parti- 
tions into  both  bedrooms.  The  British  attache 
was  cut  slightly  on  one  cheek;  otherwise  neither 
was  touched.  Had  the  bomb  fallen  five  feet  farther 
inward,  so  that  its  explosive  effect  would  have 
been  confined  within  enclosed  walls,  it  seemed  that 
the  whole  house  must  have  been  demoHshed. 

No  important  building,  mihtary  or  otherwise, 
was  struck,  so  far  as  I  could  learn,  in  those  three 
days,  and  the  punishment  fell  entirely  on  civilians 
or  wounded  in  hospitals.  Of  the  two  hundred  and 
fifty,  more  or  less,  who  were  killed  and  hurt,  the 
greater  number  were  said  to  have  been  struck  in 
the  open  street,  and  a  good  many  must  have  been 
hit  by  the  Rumanian  shrapnel.  The  danger  from 
aeroplane  bombs  is,  of  course,  not  so  much  being 
hit  by  the  bomb  itself  as  by  fragments,  paving- 
stones  and  so  on,  blown  out  from  it.  In  the  yard 
of  the  British  militaiy  attache's  house,  for  instance, 
fifty  or  sixty  feet  away  from  the  point  of  explosion, 
a  fragment  bored  clear  thi'ough  a  tree  six  or  eight 
inches  thick.  One  hea\y  bomb  landing  in  the 
middle  of  the  boulevard  not  far  from  Take  lonesco's 
house  smashed  every  window  for  a  block  around, 
broke  cornices  in  the  five-stoiy  apartment-house 
near  by,  and  peppered  its  whole  fa9ade  with  holes 
as  if  it  had  been  sprayed  with  shrapnel. 

Once,  when  bombs  had  fallen  all  over  town,  the 

236 


RUMANIA 

communique  piously  stated  that  "a  hospital,  a 
sanatorium,  and  an  orphan  asylum  were  hit,"  and 
again  when  the  communique  spoke  of  comparatively 
trifling  damage,  there  appeared  in  a  parallel  column 
an   editorial   headed    "Assassins,"    telling   of   the 

" of  victims,  dead  and  wounded,  women,  old 

men,  and  children  who  have  made  bloody  the  pave- 
ments of  our  capital."  The  blank  space  was  the 
quaint  idea  of  the  censor,  left  for  the  reader  to  fill 
in  with  "scores"  or  "hundreds"  as  he  wished.  By 
the  third  day  some  of  the  Rumanian  planes  had 
been  brought  back  from  the  front,  and  as  soon  as 
they  took  the  air  the  raids  stopped  for  the  time. 

Every  now  and  then,  during  these  nervous  days, 
an  open  touring-car  whizzed  down  the  Galea  Vit- 
torei,  and  one  caught  a  glimpse  of  the  beautiful 
Queen.  Once  I  saw  her  whirling  in  from  the  coun- 
try just  as  the  whistles  were  wailing,  alone  in  the 
back  seat,  looking  skyward  like  everybody  else,  shad- 
ing her  eyes  with  a  little  purple  fan.  No  Queen 
in  Europe  more  looks  the  part.  Tall,  stately,  yet 
always  enveloped  in  a  certain  air  of  romance,  she 
might  have  stepped  from  one  of  those  stories  of 
imaginary  Balkan  kingdoms  in  which  the  royal 
heroine  loves  the  tall,  slim  soldier  of  fortune  who 
saves  her  life,  but  must  bid  him  farewell  in  the  last 
chapter  and  return  to  her  marble  halls  for  the  sake 
of  Ruritania  and  "my  people."    It  would  be  sad 

237 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

for  the  Rumanians  to  have  an  uninteresting  Queen, 
and  Queen  Marie  seemed  to  feel  this,  and  there 
was  always  just  the  necessary  touch  of  the  theatre, 
not  too  much,  as — a  cloud  of  white  but  for  her  red 
cross,  for  she  always  appeared  in  niu-se's  costume 
— she  swept  down  the  Galea  Vittorei  graciously 
smiling  toward  the  rows  of  uncovered  heads. 

The  palace  is  a  two-story  building  on  the  main 
street,  in  quite  as  much  danger  as  anybody's  house 
— ^there  was  this  interesting  all-in-the-family  air 
about  many  things  in  Bucharest.  There  was  plenty 
of  personal  allusion,  and  the  papers  would  tell  about 
a  former  diplomat  "who  has  certainly  not  become 
inoffensive  by  finding  refuge  in  a  legation  whose 
official  neutrality  does  not  sufficiently  conceal  the 
Germanic  preferences  of  its  personnel";  or  of  the 
perfidious  porter  of  the  Boulevard  Hotel  who  locked 
his  front  door  when  people  were  hunting  cover 
from  the  aeroplanes;  or  about  the  stingy  contribu- 
tions to  the  Red  Cross  fund  made  by  a  well-known 
merchant  who  "has  been  trading  for  years  on  the 
weakness  of  our  womenfolk  for  luxury  by  selling 
them  goods  for  two  or  three  times  their  value  with 
the  one  dream  of  retiring  comfortably  some  day  to 
Vienna  or  Budapest." 

In  the  sunny  and  still  vivacious  streets,  where 
you  would  pass  now  and  then  smart  little  demoiselles, 
looking,  but  for  the  Red  Cross  on  their  sleeves, 

238 


8  '3) 


^  > 
'3  *■*? 


O  X! 

m  o 

o  ^  . 

C  S  ti 

S  g 

^  c  c; 


i —    a 

— » 


b£'3 


c   -^ 


RUMANIA 

like  sketches  from  "La  Vie  Parisienne,  I  thought 
of  Bulgaria  in  the  first  days  after  she,  too,  had  made 
the  gi'eat  decision — of  the  grim  silence  in  Sofia, 
where  there  was  scarce  a  sign  of  war  but  the  oc- 
casional levies  of  peasants,  in  sandals  and  sheep- 
skin coats,  as  wild  almost  as  their  own  sheep,  or 
now  and  then  a  baggage-train  drawn  by  black  water- 
buffaloes  creaking  slowly  through  the  cold  rain. 

The  Bulgarians  knew  only  too  well  what  war 
meant.  They  had  just  lost  a  generation  of  young 
men  in  bearing  the  brunt  of  a  war  out  of  which  they 
got  nothing,  and  they  went  in  a  little  like  battered 
gladiators,  without  illusions  or  enthusiasm,  fighting 
because  they  knew  how  and  had  to.  War  was  still 
novel  to  Bucharest.  And  those  who  had  wanted 
it  were  still  rather  pleased  to  be  in  the  mode,  to 
have  made,  as  they  would  say,  their  ^'beau  geste." 
And  in  this  mood,  they  were  more  than  ever  con- 
temptuous of  the  Bulgars.  The  papers  smiled  at 
them  in  the  fatherly  fable  fashion: 

There  was  once  an  industrious  people  who  lived  peace- 
fully raising  peas  and  beans  until  bad  luck  would  have  it 
that  they  take  for  a  King  an  unsavory  adventurer  who  had 
no  interest  in  vegetables  and  wanted  to  play  a  great  role  in 
history.  To  play  a  great  role,  a  monarch  must,  as  every- 
body knows,  kill  a  great  number  of  his  subjects.  This  didn't 
bother  the  King,  but  he  had  to  find  an  excuse  and  to  tell 
enough  lies  to  stir  up  his  gardeners  and  make  these  poor 
sheep  angry.  .  .  . 

239 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

They  were  reviled  as  "Asiatics,  true  descendants 
of  Attila,  with  no  desires  beyond  those  of  primi- 
tive man,"  and  enthusiastic  editorial  writers,  un- 
aware, apparently,  that  what  they  said  of  the  Slavs 
south  of  the  Danube  might  apply  equally  to  their 
allies  on  the  north,  derided  their  rough  furniture 
and  primitive  food  with  all  the  superior  air  of  boule- 
vardiers. 

The  Bulgarians  had  perhaps  only  one  friend  left 
in  Bucharest,  the  faithful  Bourchier,  Balkan  corre- 
spondent of  the  London  Times  since  the  memory  of 
man,  and  one  of  several  Englishmen  who,  before 
the  war,  had  adopted  Bulgaria  as  a  sort  of  second 
country.  Bourchier  is  really  an  Irishman,  but  his 
associations  with  the  Times,  with  Cambridge,  where 
he  studied,  and  with  Eton,  where  he  was  once  as- 
sistant master,  made  him  "Enghsh,"  in  the  Balkans 
at  any  rate.  For  years  "  old  Bourchier  "  was  as  well 
known  in  Sofia  as  the  prime  minister.  He  did  a 
good  deal  of  amateur  diplomacy  back  and  forth  be- 
tween the  Balkan  States,  and  it  was  his  dream  to 
see  them  united  in  the  alliance  which  seemed  so 
near  in  1912. 

I  found  him  at  a  writing-table  covered  with 
paper  and  clippings  in  the  top-floor  corner  room  of 
the  Boulevard  Hotel  overlooking  the  Galea  Vit- 
torei,  about  as  near  as  he  could  possibly  get  to  the 
mathematical   centre  and   most  exposed  spot  in 

240 


RUMANIA 

Bucharest.  There  was  nothmg  above  him  but  the 
ceiHng  and  the  galvanized  iron  cupola  from  which, 
he  patiently  observed,  he  hoped  bombs  would 
bounce  off  into  the  street. 

But  bombs,  censors,  and  all  the  nuisances  of  a 
world  at  war  were  now  viewed  with  equal  philosophy 
by  this  gracious  old-school  journalist  who  had  seen 
his  years  of  work  go  crumbling  down.  He  had  re- 
ceived a  batch  of  English  papers  that  day  and 
found  all  his  despatches  cut  to  a  few  lines — ^you 
had  to  be  a  fanatic  now,  he  said,  or  people  thought 
you  were  pro-the-other-side.  True,  he  was  still 
Bulgaria's  friend,  as  he  was  Rumania's,  because  he 
was  a  friend  of  the  Balkans,  and  an  alliance  was 
the  only  means  by  which  they  could  maintain  an 
independent  life  against  the  powers  that  had  used 
them  as  so  much  small  change  before,  and  would 
do  so  again.  Bulgaria  had  shown  both  greed  and 
fear,  but  it  was  not  fair  to  call  her  action  treason. 
She  could  easily  have  been  brought  over  to  the 
AlHes  if  the  latter  had  not  completely  bungled  their 
case  and  treated  with  half-way  measures  a  nation 
which  was  in  great  danger  and  felt  compelled  to 
-act  at  once. 

I  left  Bourchier,  with  his  lost  cause,  and  walked 
up-town  to  encounter  quite  another  point  of  view — 
that  of  the  redoubtable  Take  lonesco,  editor  of 
La  Roumanie,  once  himself  the  head  of  the  govem- 

241 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

ment,  and  ever  since  the  war  the  tireless  and  elo- 
quent advocate  of  fighting  with  the  AlHes.  I  found 
him  in  his  pleasant  town-house,  the  same  polished, 
clever,  always  entertaining  person  he  had  been  at 
our  first  meeting  the  year  before,  when  he  was  de- 
claring that  he  would  never  be  happy  until  he  had 
seen  the  Rumanian  tricolor  floating  over  the  old 
walls  of  Buda,  and  that  when  the  delegates  gathered 
around  the  green  table  to  make  peace,  Rumania 
must  be  able  to  take  her  place  with  the  rest  and 
to  say  that  for  her  size  and  resources  she  had  shed 
as  much  blood  as  they. 

Three  bombs  had  fallen  within  a  stone's  throw 
of  his  house.  "Of  course  it  will  go  before  the  end 
of  the  war,"  he  said,  and  then,  with  a  shrug  of  his 
shoulders:  "I  hate  to  lose  my  books."  Without 
waiting  for  questions,  he  hurried  on  to  say  that 
undoubtedly  his  hatred  for  "those  people"  was  as 
great  as,  if  not  greater  than,  that  of  anybody  in 
Europe.  There  was  no  bridging  the  chasm  between 
the  German  idea  and  his  own  instincts  of  freedom 
and  individualism.  Pie  had  been  talking  one  day 
before  the  war  with  a  German  statesman,  a  very 
decent,  agreeable  fellow,  with  cultivated  tastes  in 
certain  directions,  and  they  had  contrasted  their 
ideas  of  the  functions  of  government  and  people. 

He  had  spoken  of  the  tremendous  importance  of 
the  French  Revolution,  and  said  that  the  execu- 

242 


RUMANIA 

tions  of  Louis  XVI  and  Marie  Antoinette  in  France 
and  of  Charles  I  in  England  meant  more  for  hu- 
manity than  a  new  religion,  because  they  represented 
not  mere  mob  violence,  but  the  deliberate  judgment 
of  the  people  in  their  effort  to  govern  themselves. 
The  German  had  said,  "There  are  centuries  be- 
tween you  and  me,"  and  he  had  repHed,  "There 
is  more  than  that — there  is  an  ocean!"  About 
the  Bulgars  Mr.  lonesco  was  far  more  bitter  than 
before,  when  he  had  spoken  of  them  rather  hu- 
morously as  the  "Scotchmen  of  the  Balkans." 
Their  behavior  toward  Russia,  which  had  given 
them  their  independence,  was  incredible.  Their 
public  men  could  be  bought,  and  though  some  were 
intelligent  and  accompHshed — So-and-so,  for  in- 
stance, had  a  charming  appreciation  of  old  French 
poetry — ^there  wasn't  one  you  could  imagine  as  a 
friend.  I  said  that,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  I  did  have 
a  Bulgarian  friend,  and  if  they  were  so  impossible, 
how  was  it  that  the  English  had  thought  so  much 
of  them  before  the  war?  "How,  for  instance,"  I 
asked,  "do  you  explain  Bourchier"? 

"Ah — Bourchier!"  cried  Mr.  lonesco.  "A  fine 
old  fellow — absolutely  sincere!  I've  known  him 
for  years.  The  explanation  of  Bourchier  is  that 
he's  an  EngHshman.  Once  an  Englishman  gets 
an  idea  into  his  head,  nothing  can  drive  it  out. 
Bourchier   admired   the   Bulgars — they're   serious, 

243 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

frugal,  industrious — I  grant  you  all  that.  Having 
become  their  advocate,  nothing  could  shake  him. 
Why,  in  1914,  as  the  war  was  breaking  out,  we 
travelled  east  together  on  the  same  train.  Europe 
was  crumbling  to  pieces — where's  Europe  now? 
It  meant  the  end  of  eveiything — of  England,  per- 
haps— and  what  do  you  suppose  old  Bourchier 
was  thinking  about?  All  he  could  think  about 
was  what  the  war  might  mean  to  Bulgaria!" 

Nevertheless,  he  did  not  expect,  or  wish,  to  see 
Bulgaria  destroyed.  They  must  be  reduced  greatly, 
but  a  peace  that  attempted  to  crush  them  would 
not  be  lasting.  There  must  be  a  greater  Rumania, 
a  greater  Serbia,  and  a  diminished  Bulgaria  after 
the  war.  As  for  the  old  notion  of  an  alliance,  there 
was,  of  course,  no  talking  about  that  now.  Aus- 
tria would;  of  course,  disappear.  Mr.  lonesco  was 
dividmg  up  Europe  in  his  always  confident  and 
lively  way  when  the  whistles  began  wailing  again. 
"If  you'll  be  good  enough  to  come  this  way,"  he 
said,  "I  can  offer  you  the  safest  place  we  have." 

We  crossed  a  court  and  went  into  a  basement, 
and  with  several  of  his  lieutenants  and  some  of  his 
neighbor's  family  stood  under  a  door  for  a  time.  I 
was  already  late  and,  after  waiting  until  the  raiders 
seemed  safely  distant,  was  obliged  to  hurry  away 
without  asking  what  Mr.  lonesco  thought  about 
Russia   and   Constantinople.     One   of  the   minor 

244 


R  U  M  A  N  I A 

ironies  of  Rumania's  situation,  dependent  as  she 
now  was  on  Russia,  was  the  ingenuous  belief  some 
Rumanians  still  expressed  that  they  "could  never 
allow"  Russia  to  control  Constantinople. 

The  Latinism  of  which  such  a  Rumanian  as  Mr. 
lonesco  is  likely  to  make  much  was  now,  of  course, 
decidedly  in  the  foreground.  In  peace  times  there 
are  many  natural  ties  between  this  rich,  compara- 
tively undeveloped  little  country  and  the  great 
industrial  nations  directly  west  of  it.  It  imports 
most  of  its  manufactured  articles,  and  not  only 
has  grain,  beef,  and  petroleum  to  sell,  but  kept  on 
selling  them  to  its  present  enemies  up  to  the  end. 
These  material  ties  being  broken,  sentimental  im- 
pulses had  a  clear  field,  and  while  the  Germanic 
influence  was  strong — even  then,  in  my  hotel,  Ger- 
man was  the  only  other  language  except  Rumanian, 
which  most  of  the  servants  spoke — ^the  sympathies 
of  the  educated  minority,  who  take  theu'  culture 
and  point  of  view  from  France,  were  generally  the 
other  way.  While  it  is  doubtless  true,  as  the  King 
is  said  to  have  remarked  before  the  war,  that  not 
more  than  ten  per  cent  of  the  people  wanted  war, 
yet  most  of  this  ten  per  cent  spoke  French  as  com- 
monly as  they  did  Rimianian  and  regarded  them- 
selves as  the  direct  descendants  of  Roman  colonists 
and  the  Latins  of  the  East. 

Even  in  peace  times  this  inherit?  ^e  was  con- 

245 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

stantly  recalled,  and  in  the  music-halls  they  threw 
the  face  of  the  Emperor  Trajan  on  the  screen  just 
as  we  do  that  of  a  popular  political  leader  at  home. 
And  now  the  little  papers  were  celebrating  the 
sacred  union  with  France  and  Italy,  and  flinging 
fervid  appeals  toward  Greece  and  Spain: 

Spain — a  beautiful  country,  brave  people!  Spain — land 
of  sunlight,  oranges,  and  flowers,  where  springs  the  genial 
vine,  and  one  hears  the  joyous  music  of  guitars  and  cas- 
tanets! Spain — where  people  are  robust  and  svelte  and 
hearts  beat  fast  with  feeling,  where  the  will  is  of  steel,  love 
passionate,  and  bravery  legendary!  Spain — country  of 
Latms,  with  a  glorious  past  and  a  future  that  ought  also 
to  be  glorious,  it  is  toward  thee,  in  this  terrible  moment, 
that  all  Latinity  turns !  Spain,  full  of  knightly  sentiment, 
awake!  .  .  . 

He  who  made  this  appeal,  the  writer  went  on  to 
say,  was  a  Danube  peasant,  a  descendant  of  the 
colonists  of  Trajan,  of  that  Dacia  Jelix—oi  Dacia, 
happy  in  the  distant  past,  and  happy,  let  us  hope, 
in  the  not-distant  future.  But  Trajan  hunself 
came  from  Iberia,  and  so  did  most  of  his  colonists. 
It  was  for  this  reason  that  the  names  of  Perez, 
Zamora,  Zorilla,  Posadas,  and  GaHcia  were  found 
so  often  in  Rumania,  and  that  a  Rumanian  under- 
stood Spanish  so  easily. 

While  you  were  fighting  the  Moors  and,  through  Colum- 
bus, giving  Europe  a  new  continent,  we,  the  unknowns  of 

246 


RUMANIA 

history,  defended  Europe  against  the  Turkish  avalanche — 
and  that  was  something.  Once  estabHshed,  with  God  knows 
what  difficulties,  we  have  cultivated  the  Latin  idea;  we  axe 
soaked  in  it.  Our  Latin  origin  is  our  parchment  of  nobility, 
our  only  reason  for  being  independent  in  this  part  of  Eu- 
rope which  is  so  far  from  being  Latin.  .  .  . 

Meanwhile  the  Rumanian  armies  were  learning 
what  war  is,  and  it  was  not  quite  what  it  had  looked 
to  be  through  the  cafe  smoke  of  1915.  It  was  not 
a  mere  matter  of  taking  the  Russian  wave  at  the 
flood  and  waltzing  down  to  Budapest.  The  enemy, 
regardless  of  the  fact  that  it  was  Transylvania  the 
Rimianians  wanted  and  there,  beyond  the  Car- 
pathians, they  had  hoped  to  fight,  attacked  from 
the  south,  in  the  rear,  wiped  out  a  whole  division 
at  Turtucaia  and  were,  during  these  aeroplane 
raids,  closing  in  on  Constanza,  the  only  seaport, 
and  in  an  air-line  not  more  than  thirty-five  miles 
from  the  capital. 

Even  the  Transylvanians  revealed  that  density 
with  which  civihans  often  misunderstand  the  mo- 
tives of  the  armies  which  come  to  hberate  them, 
and  the  melodious  French  of  some  of  the  proclama- 
tions reprinted  in  the  Bucharest  papers  brought  a 
curious  echo  of  those  blunter  warnings  which  were 
posted  up  on  Belgian  walls  in  1914: 

L'Armie  roumaine,  en  marche  sur  la  terre  sacree,  oii.  ri- 
sonne.  .  .  .     The   Rumanian   army,  entering   the   sacred 

247 


WHITE    NIGHTS 

ground,  where  the  voice  of  their  oppressed  brothers  has  cried 
out  for  centuries,  has  not  come  as  the  enemy  of  those,  what- 
ever their  race  or  belief,  who  remain  quietly  at  home.  On 
the  contrary,  it  is  animated  by  the  most  paternal  sentiments 
for  all  the  peaceable  population.  In  certain  localities  it  has 
found,  however,  those — happily  few  in  number — who  do 
not  comprehend  or  know  how  to  appreciate  the  spirit  of 
kindness  and  fraternity  in  which  the  Rumanian  army  ad- 
vances through  the  liberated  territory.  These  people  re- 
ceive us  as  enemies,  attack  our  convoys  of  isolated  soldiers 
and  those  marching  in  small  groups. 

We  find  ourselves  forced,  with  the  most  profound  regret, 
to  inform  all  who  take  this  hostile  attitude  that  we  shall 
use  against  them  the  severest  measures  of  repression.  And 
in  order  that  these  actions,  which  lower  human  nature,  shall 
not  be  repeated,  we  shall  extend  our  exemplary  measures  of 
rigor  to  the  neighboring  population  of  those  places  where 
treacherous  attacks  of  this  sort  take  place.  .  .  . 

A  day  or  two  after  the  lull  in  the  aeroplane  raids 
the  newsboys  were  shouting  a  victory  in  the  south 
and  the  crossing  of  the  Danube.  I  started  north 
again,  but  as  we  reached  Moscow  after  seven  days 
and  nights  of  hard  travelling,  in  a  driving  midnight 
rain,  word  had  come  that  the  Rumanians  were 
pushed  back  again  and  that  Constanza  had  been 
taken.  It  was  not  likely  to  be  said  after  this  war, 
as  it  was  said  after  the  second  Balkan  War,  that 
the  Rumanians  were  people  who  got  something 
for  nothing,  whatever  might  be  their  fortune  in 
the  end. 


248 


IBRARY  FACILITY 


AA    000  484  972 


